Will VirtualBox Support more than 1 IDE Controller

[mindrunner]

Well, there's a particular VMWare appliance THat runs in VMware Player. (Isilon Strage Virtual Clusters).

I managed to use the OVF Tool and convert it to a OVF format.
When trying to import it into VirtualBox, to my dismay, I realised this:-

Too many IDE controllers in OVF; VirtualBox only supports one.

I Know IDE controllers are not *that* important in the age of SATA, but just asking.

[TerryE]

Vbox only supports IDE:0:0 HD0, IDE:0:1 HD1, IDE:1:0 CD/DVD 0, IDE:1:1 HD2

[Hawkwindeb]

I just ran into this same problem. I was waiting for the fix to the import OVF (Ticket #4452: "ovf:/disk/" issue) and this fixed in 3.0.2, my import gets further, but ran into the too many IDE controllers. Both of my vm's disks are on ide0 (1st on ide0:0 2nd on ide0:1) so what can I delete in the XML to eliminate the 2nd (ide1) disk properly and completely.

Can I at this point before import change to SATA? I have Intel ICH10R RAID ctrl, ie: SATA on a Windows XP SP3 host, vm is WinXP SP2 but will upgrade to SP3. I remember reading in the forums about changing a VBox WinXP guest from IDE to SATA, but not before/during import of an OVF. Whichever way is posible and/or easiest.


Thanks.

[mindrunner]

I just ran into this same problem. I was waiting for the fix to the import OVF (Ticket #4452: "ovf:/disk/" issue) and this fixed in 3.0.2, my import gets further, but ran into the too many IDE controllers. Both of my vm's disks are on ide0 (1st on ide0:0 2nd on ide0:1) so what can I delete in the XML to eliminate the 2nd (ide1) disk properly and completely.

Can I at this point before import change to SATA? I have Intel ICH10R RAID ctrl, ie: SATA on a Windows XP SP3 host, vm is WinXP SP2 but will upgrade to SP3. I remember reading in the forums about changing a VBox WinXP guest from IDE to SATA, but not before/during import of an OVF. Whichever way is posible and/or easiest.


Thanks.

HiTerry, thanks for the info. Is there anyway we could change the cdrom to ide1:1?
I tried editing the vmx file and changing it to ide1:1 before converting, but still ended up with the same error message.
Maybe next I'll try manually converting the vmdk to vdi, then try & build a brand new VM using virtualbox.

[TerryE]

Can I just put my hand up an say that I haven't played with OVF containers too much because the import / export operations are just too slow for me. It's just too much of a pain. The whole open format concept for VM architectures is still having its wrinkles sorted -- such as mapping IDE resources compatibly. I find it just so much easier to import the virtual disks and build the machine from the ground up. I do package up systems -- but in this case I first prep the virtual disks by zeroing out free space, defragging (or you do a disk to disk cp -a in the case of Linux) and then packing with 7Zip. I also include a script that uses a bunch of VBoxManage commands to create the VM.

I haven't looked into the OVF container format but I guess that its just a collection of XML definition files and disk containers in a ZIPped container. The easiest work around would be to unpack this manually and recreate the VM yourself. In Linux udev still enumerates the disks so the direct disk on IDE:! is still sdc or hdc (depending on your distro's rules setup). Windows similarly isolates you from the IDE channel position.