Emulate Dell BIOS in VMware player

[mholmes]

Hi, I need to be able to try some images that we've made using Dell's OEM XP pro OS and want to use VMware Player to mount them up virtually. The images are made using PING. Obviously, they will look for a Dell motherboard and not find it so the imaging install will fail. How can I get Vmware to look like dell hardware?

thanks

Mike

 

[mholmes]

no one?

I thought for sure that someone in here would know this answer or at least be able to point me in agood direction

 

[gbhall]

A better place to ask might be the ping site and forum. Also what does vmware site say about images created with ping? Maybe it simply can't be done. Because, as you say, the vmware player might not be able to supply the necessary Dell-compatible hardware mapping. Remember a drive system image can only ever be expected to restore on the hardware it came from. Or identical. Otherwise it will blue screen like crazy.

As far as I know, vmplayer will detect much recent hardware that the VM is running on, and when it cannot, it will ask you to choose from a small range of bog-standard hardware that it can emulate. But it is doing that when you install an OS inside the VM. So you are effectively installing an XP, or Win7 or Ubuntu on your host hardware, excepting possibly a few things like a network card.

You might install one XP in a VM, take a Ping image and then run that in a VM on other PC's of the same hardware description. If that is what you want to do.....

 

[mholmes]

PING images

Hi, thanks for your reply. The reason I am trying to do this is to double check some of the 30+ department specific images we already have without having to pull out new hardware. I have heard talk of getting Vmware to emulate certain SLIC tables like Dell and thought maybe someone could tell me how. I just want to be able to make a virtual session for each image and leave them "out there" to browse through if we need to pick one for a deployment.

 

[gbhall]

Have you googled 'slic and vmware' ?? There seems to be ways of doing what you want, but it is vmware proper, not vmplayer. That might not be a problem to you, judging from you having 30+ images :wave: