Recognizing hardware from a Windows virtual machine hosted on Linux

[noli]

Hi,

    I would like to isntall windows in a virtual machine run from linux, and run my labview vi's and do aquisition from there.  I tried once using a virtualized Windows XP 32-bit on ubuntu 64-bit, with Virtualbox, but the windows installation didn't recognize my PCI-MIO-16E-4 card.  Maybe its because I didn't have the linux drivers installed.. I don't know.  Soon I will begin using a the 7853R FPGA with the PXI-1036 Chassis, and would prefer if my virutalized Windows installation could see this hardware.

 Has anyone gone through the steps of using NI hardware from a virtual Windows installation?  Either Virtualbox, Xen,  Vmware, or whatever.. 

Thanks,

-Sidney

[ajangot · Accepted solution]

Hi,

National Instruments don't support virtual machine but I'm pretty sure that your PXI will be recognize by your system.Max use ethernet device to find devices, so if your network works, you will be able to use it.

Regards,

[yyao]

Hi Sidney,

I see that this thread is a bit old, but I still have something to add. I know for a fact that VirtualBox, VMWare and VirtualPC won't let a guest OS see any real PCI card installed on the host computer. However, you might have better luck with Xen. There are options in Xen which allows you to pass PCI devices forward to guest OS's. People have gotten pretty far with using PCI forwarding that they have even managed to run Windows Vista with full hardware acceleration with Aero as a guest operating system. The only requirement is for your CPU to have virtualization support, i.e. the vmx or svm flag. The only catch is, Xen is significantly harder to set up.

I haven't tried this myself, and I am not from the LabVIEW group, and I am by no means authorative on this topic (don't let my signature fool you).

If you manage to get this to work, we would be interested to hear from you!

[noli]

Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely try this when I get a chance!

-Sidney