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My department does conversions for people who bought our software to get their data out of their old system and in to our system. Often they will be running odd or archaic systems that the only way to get the data to us is a tape backup.

Currently we have the various OS's installed on several hard drives across several computers. We would like to virtualize this, however many of our tape drives (and we have a lot due to the fact that they can send us anything under the sun) are IDE instead of SCSI. I have successfully in the past done SCSI pass through with VMWare to get SCSI tape drives to work (This was done back in VMWare Server 2), however there was no IDE pass through support at that time.

Due to the long tail of the internet when I attempt to search and see if any of the newer VM products offer IDE pass through I keep getting results from 2007 saying "No you can't do it"

Can any current VM software perform IDE passthough for a tape device? I am willing to accept a Type 1 or Type 2 hypervisor, however a Type2 that supports Windows as the host OS would be preferred.

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Is it possible to get an IDE to SCSI/SATA converter and use one of those? I haven't tried it myself, but it might work. –  TheCleaner Jun 12 '12 at 14:45

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

What MIGHT work is to use a secondary IDE controller and use PCI passthrough (which is available on ESXi with selected host hardware, and with Xen although that might imply having to use paravirtualized guests).

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