I've got a nice stable of SlackWare 11 servers running on my ESX 3.0.2 machine (recently patched from 3.0.1) after some poking and prodding. SlackWare 12 is giving me more difficulty, however.

On SlackWare 11, I was able to configure my VM's to use the BusLogic controller and start my installation work with the scsi.s kernel. This combination has worked very well for me, and further adjustments have merely involved shrinking the kernel by removing support for hardware that VMWare doesn't include. The only other accommodation I've needed for my servers without X or other GUI overhead was to mkdir /etc/rc.d/rc{0,1,2,3,4,5,6}.d and touch /etc/rc.d/init.d/network /etc/rc.d/init.d/networking before I ran the VMWare Tools installer.... Oh, I also had a problem with VMware Tools 3.0.1 not liking a kernel newer than 2.6.19, but that's well documented in the VMware forums and I'm told version 3.0.2 has fixed this issue.

When I tried SlackWare 12 with the BusLogic controller, I started seeing random lock-ups & crashes as soon as I put some real load onto the machine: Sure, I could compile smaller kernels, but the moment I tried to do a NFS copy, scp, or rsync to move my two TB of data onto the new server from the backup machine, I lost control of the foreground process. I'd hate to think of what might happen if my full company of end-users were to start Samba-banging on this fragile server.

PROBLEM: VMWare doesn't recommend the BusLogic controller, but then again, they don't officially support SlackWare, either. As I said above, the combo works fine for me with SlackWare 11.

Another Problem: The hugesmp.s kernel doesn't play nicely with the LSI Logic (virtual) SCSI Host Adapter that VMWare prefers we use, so I can't partition my virtual hard drives. It almost acts like I'm trying to use a kernel that lacks support for my hardware: I'm able to boot, but I can't run cfdisk /dev/sda to partition my hard drive and get any work done. cfdisk reports "FATAL ERROR: Cannot open disk drive"

cat /proc/scsi/scsi - shows nothing after the "Attached devices:" header.
cat /proc/scsi/mptspi/2 - shows "ioc0: LSI53C1030, FwRev=00000000h, Ports=1, MaxQ=128"

Is there perhaps some kernel parameter I can use to help the system see my /dev/sd_ hard drives? Is there some module I can insmod? Is there a magic incantation I must utter before I can partition my drives and install SlackWare 12 under VMWare ESX? Is there some other /proc/ file that will help to diagnose the problem further?

Hmmmm....
When I boot from a Knoppix CD .ISO, I can see the drives and partition them with QTParted, but when I reboot with SlackWare 12, I still don't see any indication of a SCSI hard drive attached to the VM.

I'm going to try an original SlackWare installation CD, just in case there's something subtly corrupt with my .ISO file.

Closed at the request of the OP