In order to install a fresh copy of Windows Server on a VM with the VMWare Paravirtual SCSI controller, as the driver for the PVSCSI adapter is not included in the default Windows Server ISO, you would use the built-in floppy images to make the PVSCSI driver available during the installation, avoiding the need to install using a different SCSI controller and then swap the controller after the installation of the guest OS and VMWare Tools.

To facilitate this, you would add a virtual floppy drive, connect the correct floppy image containing the PVSCSI driver, and then load the driver during the disk selection portion of the installation wizard. Unfortunately, since the deprecation of the Flas  ...

Linux distros with a 3.x kernel running on virtualized hardware (e.g. pvscsi on VMware) may ever so often spit out the following error:

$ dmesg | grep "WRITE SAME"
kernel: sda2: WRITE SAME failed. Manually zeroing.

This is because the disk driver (in our case: the VMware paravirtual driver) does not support the WRITE SAME SCSI command, resulting in this message.

While this poses no problem for the system at all, you may want to get rid of these messages, which is done by disabling the use of the WRITE SAME command. This can be done through a bit of configuration. Most modern systems have systemd on board which can be used for this, but in case your system doesn't, there's also a  ...