Running Cumulus under VMWare

[TNETWeather]

My current weather platform is an XP Pro on a stand alone workstation headless. It just runs.. but it is getting old and is an extra piece of equipment in my home office... which helps heat it up.

I am about to setup a vSphere 5.5 server in my office and am thinking of setting up a Win7 VM for the weather stuff, but am not really sure about the weather station connection. Having a VP2 Plus, the data logger is using serial not USB which has been very reliable.

I did some checking on the website but it appears that most are using XP under VMware if they are at all.

Curious if anyone has run into problems doing this?

My most specific concern is the use of VirtualVP which allows me to gather data from the station and provide it to two weather clients (Cumulus and WD) as I still use both.

Any suggestions, comments?

Ref:
vSphere will be 5.5.1, on a box with Xenon processors, and 32GB of ram (possibly more). This is a new project for me and will most likely be a month or so before I start it, just collecting info.

[mcrossley]

I have no direct experience of running Cumulus and VirtualVP on vSphere, but virtual serial and USB ports can work a treat. You can even leave the device connected to the physical port on one server, and then vMotion the VM to another server and the USB port continues to work as if it is still local across the IP network. Not sure how well it would work for demanding work such as streaming video, but for low data throughput such as USB/Serial adapters it works a treat.

[fowlerd303]

I can't comment directly in regards to your setup but I am running mine in a virtual environment.

HP Gen 8 Microserver running ESXi 5.1. I've got a VM with Windows Home Server 2011 on which Cumulus is installed. USB Passthough works fine connecting the Oregon Scientific WMR100.

[N0BGS]

Kevin:

I'm running VMware 5.5 ESXi here as my host with a Windows 7 VM as my weather computer. Console connection to VP2 is USB, however. Never a problem with it. Incidentally, my Linux web server is also a VM on that same host.

You are probably already aware, but if you upgrade your VM hardware level to 10 in ESXi 5.5 you then MUST use the web client to make any changes to your settings. The VSphere client can no longer make the changes. The web client is all Flash based. Not sure what VMware was thinking....

--Kurt

[tumutbound]

I run VMware Workstation 9 under Linux with an XP guest for Cumulus (WH1080 USB connected). I also run Windows 7 for CAD software.
Very reliable so far. No problems with the weather side of things.

[TNETWeather]

Thanks for the info. Won't be doing this until sometime after May but I have now budgeted for the server/hardware and the necessary stuff I will need.