VMWare and the serial port

Hello Hivemind

My wife has a legacy machine at her work which uses (or I should used) an XP desktop with a serial port to communicate with a piece of equipment. The original PC has died, and she can't get cap-ex approval for a new machine so the technicians have given her XP running in VMWare, on a Win10 PC. The PC has a serial port (!) which is configured with the same baud rate etc as the original PC, and is added to the VMWare config.

But it doesn't work (the program in the VM cannot communicate with the machine, it thinks the cable is unplugged / machine is powered down).

Does anyone have any good ideas / things to try or sources of information?

I've never actually tried getting a VM to work with a real serial port, since i have not had a laptop with one of those in nearly a decade!

But I have had pretty good success with most USB to serial converters, with VMs. You could try one of those.

What is the serial device that is being communicated with?

It's a Parker-Hannefin translation table

I am not using a real COM port either.

My XP VMs do not auto-connect to the physical serial port. I tell them to connect with the Workstation menu VM->Removable Devices->Serial Port->Connect

In order to get mine working, I had to edit the .vmx file. I edited/changed the lines for serial0. serial0 equates to COM1.
My lines:
serial0.present = "TRUE"
serial0.fileName = "COM5"
serial0.tryNoRxLoss = "FALSE"
serial0.startConnected = "FALSE"

I've seen native COM ports work with VMWare Windows XP and 7 guests on Windows XP and Windows 7 hosts, but I've never tried it with a Win10 host, because I've never had a PC capable of running Win10 that also had a native COM port.



If dYoast's suggestion doesn't work, I would also suggest the virtual (USB) COM port (like the Keyspan USA-19HS). You can set it to automatically connect to the VM when it boots up. I actually have that feature disabled because I've always had multiple VMs on the same PC and having it auto-connect actually made it harder to predict which VM it would connect to if I had more than one open. You may be able to do something like dYoast's suggestion to edit the vmx file to auto-connect the USB COM port to the VM as a particular COM port number if VMWare's auto-connect feature gets wonky.

If this is VMWare workstation go to Settings of VM Add Serial Port. Check "Use Physical Serial Port" and the use drop down to point to the "Real Com port" Maybe COM1 in your case. This should be Com1 in the vm now. Works for me with WIN10 host running VMWare Workstation VM WIN7.