Virtual Machine Questions

[BJZeak]

I have a client that has a Xenix/SCO machine, Circa 1989, running 24/7 365 with an informix database which he isn't willing to give up.

There was a power failure last night long enough to shut down the UPS which in turn took down this machine. The Power Supply has failed to restart so I now have to determine a way forward.

I have a ghost image of the Xenix/SCO HD along with nightly LoneTar backups of the informix data which I have successfully restored in the past. So expect I could do so again provided I can restart the hardware. However, this isn't a long term solution being the hardware is well passed its prime.

I was poking around the internet looking for some other options and wondering:

1) could xenix/SCO possibly run in a vmware machine?

2) if Xenix does run, could it be accessed via multiple telnet sessions inside a Virtual Machine?

3) How does VMWare determine what Video emulation is required for a machine? Just wondering how the OS video drivers would react to a virtual video card?

4) how would I go about attempting to restore a ghost image on a virtual machine? I am sure it wouldn't be worth the time to attempt to reinstall the XENIX OS and Applications from Floppy disk(S). Assuming these disks are error free. ... the vm machine has external media options like CD's ... I expect I would have to put an image of Ghost in one virtual CD and the Xenix Ghost image in another virtual CD. But not sure if VMware will allow me to interact with Ghost OR if VMWARE will be able to fool Ghost into thinking it has a CD to read from.

5) there was some mention of being able to mount a xenix drive in Linux however expecting this would only allow reading from the XENIX filesystem, I wouldn't expect any applications specifically informix to run under Linux or any other flavour of unix.

 

[cabraun]

1) could xenix/SCO possibly run in a vmware machine?

Well, not saying that you couldn't get it to work somehow but, it is not on the list of supported guest OSes (

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/intro_supguest_ws.html)

so if it is production data, I personally would not do it and therefore questions 205 are moot, IMHO.

 

[cabraun]

Sorry I meant questions 2-5 not 205

 

[Roadki11]

Six or seven years ago I worked at a company that ran SCO Openserver 5.x. I managed to install it in VMWare workstation and get it running fine. It wasn’t easy or smooth but it was accomplished. I have since lost my documentation on how to do it but everything I needed was on google. It was trial and error until I figured out the best workable way of doing it. I am sure with a lot patience and research and trial and error you could probably get it done. I have P2V'ed using ghost images, it does work but that was with Windows OS's and VMWare has disk convertion utilities for Windows. The trick with VMing SCO was getting the disk to boot with the correct boot string. I would guess you will need to reinstall the OS from scratch. Difficult task no doubt....

RoadKi11

"This apparent fear reaction is typical, rather than try to solve technical problems technically, policy solutions are often chosen." - Fred Cohen