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ESXi does not support physical serial and parallel ports (1003129)
Details
This article provides information on the current availability of physical serial and parallel port support in ESXi.
Solution
VMware ESXI 5.0 supports physical serial and parallel devices. However, ESXi 4.1.x and earlier versions do not. All versions of ESX support physical serial and parallel ports.
If you are using ESXi 4.1 and below , you can configure and use a virtual serial or parallel port as a named pipe or an output file.
VMware recommends that you:
Use named pipes when you want to transfer data between two virtual machines using serial port.
Use an output file when you want to transfer data from a virtual machine to the ESXi host using a serial port or parallel port interface.
Note: Neither of these choices require any physical serial or parallel ports on the ESXi host. For information on configuring a virtual serial port to output to a named pipe or output file, see Add a Serial Port to a Virtual Machine in the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.
VMware is actively working with over 250 partners to enable solutions that typically depend on serial port communication for ESXi. VMware ESXi is a more secure hypervisor architecture that enables third-party solutions through CIM providers.
Note: In ESXi 4.1 the virtual serial port can connect to a physical serial port or to a file on the host computer. For more information, see Parallel and Serial Port Configuration section from the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.
Tags
virtual-serial-port virtual-parallel-port
Update History
<pre>07/02/2012 - Added ESXi 5.0 support to resolution with link to documentation.
</pre>
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