After about two years ago to the day (plus or minus), I’ve finally gotten around to moving a friend’s ancient SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 to run on a modern operating system within a virtual machine.
My friend acquired a brand new Dell Xeon server with 8GB of memory and tonnes of disk space. It came pre-installed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. I got him to register with Red Hat Network and then set up the system and got it fully updated. All’s well on that count.
Next was to take the experience from two years ago where I managed to install the SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 on a RHEL 5.4 system and make that happen in the latest and greatest of systems.
First was to create the ISOs of the CDs needed (dd if=/dev/cdrom of=NameOfCD.iso) and kept it in a directory for ISOs which I created in the /opt directory.
Second was to fire-up virt-manager (from the GUI so that my friend knows what is happening), and then go about creating a new VM. The virt-manager had problems to start up which puzzled me. This is 2012 and this machine is a server class machine. It could not be that Dell shipped the machine with support for virtualization turned off in the BIOS, could it? Was I so wrong. For reasons I cannot explain, Dell chose to DISABLE support for virtualization in the BIOS even for this server class machine. I had to reboot the machine, go into the BIOS settings, enable the virtualization option and restart RHEL.
This time, firing up virt-manager worked like a charm and the proceeded to create a new VM.
The following screenshots are self-explanatory including the installation screens from SCO:
-
- Giving the VM a name and setting the installation source as ISO
-
- Choosing the ISO to install from
-
- Setting the amount of memory and CPUs allocated
-
- Setting the disk size. Max drive size is 2GB.
-
- Check “configuration before install” and change the hypervisor to QEMU and architecture to 32bit.
-
- Choose the NIC on the left and set the device model to pcnet
-
- Choose the Video option and set the video to vga
-
- this is the screen that comes up when the SCO installation process starts. It detemines the hardware that is known and shows it on the screen. Notice that there are no network cards in this. it has to be added later – post installation.
The key choices in the dialog boxes were as follows:
a) Check on the “Customize configuration before install”
b) Set Virt Type as qemu and Architecture to be i686
c) Change the NIC type to pcnet
d) Change the Video to vga
With those settings, the installation of the VM started.
The SCO installation is so archaic and ancient that it amazes me that I could still install it into a 21st century virtual machine! And kudos to the KVM and virt engineers!
As the SCO installation proceeds, there are few things that need to be chosen:
a) The installation device is an IDE CDROM on the secondary master.
b) When chosing the “Hard Disk Setup”, change the “Tracking” to “Bad Tracking Off”. This enormously speeds up the “formating” of the drive by SCO.
c) Change the “Network Card” to manual select and then chose “AMD PCNet-PCI Adapter”
d)And continue to the last screen and go ahead with installation.
So, a few minutes later, it is all installed and the system will shutdown. You can then safely restart the VM and you should be in the default text console. Like any Linux machine, you do have alternate screens available by using the menu options of the VM window “Send Key” and send “Ctl-Alt-F1″ etc to the VM and it will switch to the various virtual consoles available.
Once you are logged into the system, you can go ahead and use it.
I will follow-up with the installation of a product called “Throughbred 8.4.1″ in a subsequent post.
In the meantime, if you have additional SCO CDs such as:
a) SCO-Optional-Services.iso, or
b) SCO-RS-505A.iso, or
c) SCO-SkunkWare.iso, or
d) SCO-Vision-2K.iso, and
e) SCO-Voyager-5-JDK.iso,
You can use Virt-Manager’s interface for the VM-in-question’s “Details” menu option and chose the CDROM option to connect to the ISO that is needed. Once it is linked up, switch over to the VM’s console, and assuming you are logged in as root, type in “mount /dev/cd0 /mnt” to mount it. For some reason, the first time I type the command it throws an error, and have to do it a second time when it succeeds. Then you have access to the ISO as a local CD.
deman2
/ February 27, 2012Harish,
I guess that’s how Dell server pre-configured. I faced the same issue when installing CentOS 6.2 x64 in one of the Dell PowerEdge R300 server last week. The host OS is Windows Server 2003, so I chosed VirtualBox to install CentOS. I got the error message regarding VT-X. At first I was quite confused why a server class system could not handle 64-bit virtualization installation. Turn out, the virtualization is OFF. Hmm..
gary_at_rit
/ February 27, 2012Every machine I have every bought personally or professionally has had VT-x turned off in the bios by default. Maybe its some kind of standard?
harishpillay
/ February 27, 2012Thanks for the comments, Gary and dman2.
I certainly want to know what the rationale would be to have the Virt capability turned off on a server class machine. Would it to pass some form of acceptance test at the factory?
I wonder how other OEMs do this.
Gordon messmer
/ February 29, 2012I’ve seen it speculated that virtualization is disabled by default because a virus could use the virtualization extensions to hide itself from a guest operating system. The virus would set itself up as a hypervisor at boot and run your server OS inside a protected environment to hide itself.
I haven’t seen that confirmed by an OEM, but it’s standard across OEMs as far as I know.
harishpillay
/ February 29, 2012Thanks, Gordon for the comment. I would dispute that speculation. There is nothing about virt per se that a malware can do that it cannot do in a standard boot sequence. I would say it is a clever spin by some OEMs when asked why they disabled virt support in the bios at factory ship.