For some reason, the suggested drive type when create a new virtual image is SCSI. I found a discussion that suggested that SCSI was slower to emulate than IDE, because it was more complex. Admittedly that discussion was for Microsoft’s offering. At any rate, couldn’t find anything for SCSI as a default.
For my purposes, however, performance isn’t that important. Lacking a reason not to, I went with the default. I then discovered a reason not to use the default.
I run Ubuntu as my host OS, and the VM in question is a vanilla Debian install. Burning a CD (i.e. using cdrecord) seems to affect the virtual machine in some odd fashion. I know cdrecord accesses the burner as if it was a SCSI device, and the error message that shows up in the virtual machine’s console was something to the effect of “SCSI device reset…”.
The net effect, however, is that running cdrecord in the host OS puts the virtual machine’s SCSI hard drive offline. After running cdrecord in the host, it was no longer possible to log in, via console or ssh – presumably because the disk was gone, as console echoing worked, as did ping.
Fortunately, I was able to transfer the entire system in-kind to a new virtual IDE disk I created. I tried to file a bug with VMWare, but gave up trying to find a place to file a bug that didn’t require me to have paid support.
