Netware 6.5 in Virtual PC 2004

Last week I attended a course at Commvault in Oberhausen, Germany. The course was “QiNetix Galaxy System Administration Level I”.

There was a lab setup for the students with Wyse Thin Clients connected to a Dell PowerEdge 850 with 2Gigs of RAM. Nice hardware setup. During the labs we also had some virtual servers running in MS Virtual PC 2004 (a pity, i prefer using VMware)…

Because we are running NetWare 6.5 at our company I was interested in how Commvault would work on that OS. The solution of course was to install it in VPC, but then i ran into a problem with the network driver of the virtual machine.

The solution was quite easy, as Novell delivers some unsupported drivers with it’s OS.

During installation the next error will occur:

No network board driver has been selected.
Press [enter] to continue.

This is how to continue when you experience this error:
Press [Enter] to accept the error message.
Select Modify and Press [Enter] twice
Press [Ins] twice to add an unsupported driver
Press [F3] to enter the driver location
Specify c:\nwserver\drivers\upsupdrv as location and press [enter]
The driver named DC21X4.LAN will appear. Select it by pressing [enter]

You can now continue installing Netware on Virtual PC.

Another interesting read might be this: Running NetWare 6 Under VMware Workstation for Windows.
The solution provided here (using the nw5-idle.nlm in the Netware guest) will work with VPC too. Without running this Idle manager Netware will use 100% CPU, you will not regret using it.