Advantages of virtual machine - Serial device in Virtual Machine

Virtual Machine is a completely separate individual operating system installation on your usual operating system. It is implemented by software emulation and hardware virtualization.

Virtual machine is a software implementation of a physical machine - computer - that works and executes analogically to it. Virtual machines are divided in two categories based on their use and correspondence to real machine: system virtual machines and process virtual machines. First category provides a complete system platform that executes complete operating system, second one will run a single program.

Frequently multiple virtual machines with their own OS's are used in server consolidation, where different services are run in separate virtual environments, but on the same physical machine.

The main advantages of virtual machines:

• Multiple OS environments can exist simultaneously on the same machine, isolated from each other;
• Virtual machine can offer an instruction set architecture that differs from real computer's;
• Easy maintenance, application provisioning, availability and convenient recovery.

The main disadvantages:

• When multiple virtual machines are simultaneously running on a host computer, each virtual machine may introduce an unstable performance, which depends on the workload on the system by other running virtual machines;
• Virtual machine is not that efficient as a real one when accessing the hardware.

Virtualization brings you a number of advantages – centralizing network management, reducing dependency on additional hardware and software, etc. But as it is always the case, it has certain shortcomings too.

There are a lot of cases when the virtualization software struggles to provide full and reliable connecting serial devices to the virtual environment (VMWare serial port passthrough, ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V serial port redirection). Or the appliance can be accessed from the virtual machine but it may not function properly. How to deal with that situation?

When accessing a serial device from a virtual machine is not possible, Serial to Ethernet Connector will reliably connect virtual serial port over Ethernet to the virtual machine. With this software you will be able to access a serial device from your guest OS, even if the device is not plugged into the host OS but connected to a remote PC.

The software allows providing any system with an unlimited number of virtual serial interfaces. A virtual COM port created with the help of the software behaves exactly like a real port and mirrors all the activities of a physical COM port. This allows accessing local serial devices in virtual machines: to Hyper-V, VMware, Xendesktop, adding COM ports to VirtualBox etc. hypervisors over any distance. Serial to Ethernet Connector can be used with such operating systems: Windows and Linux.

Below you will find a few simple steps that will help you redirect serial data to a virtual machine:

1. Firstly, download Serial to Ethernet Connector. Then install the software on the host machine with the connected COM port device and on the guest OS.
2. Once installed, start the Serial to Ethernet program on the host PC, start the app and choose “Server connection”. Configure the connection settings and click “Create connection” to open the port with the device attached.
3. On a virtual machine, choose “Client connection”. Enter the server’s IP address as well as the name of the open serial port and click “Connect”.

That’s it! Now, you can access the required COM port device from a virtual machine easily and effortlessly.