Getting Scale Windows Drivers
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Like any virtualization platform, you want to have the best, latest drivers for your VMs to run most efficiently on them. When running Windows on a Scale HC3 cluster you will need to have either installed the Scale drivers at install time or have built the drivers into your image. But after installation we still need to update these drives from time to time. Normally new drivers will become available after certain system updates, the driver installation ISO is included with the system update automatically but the VMs will not deploy them without intervention.
To get the latest drivers will can easily do this in a number of ways, but probably the easiest is to just mount the latest Scale drive ISO from our Scale cluster from a Windows VM. We know that we have a Windows VM or else we don't need to do this at all
Of course, if you have only a single Windows VM you would just mount the ISO and run the updater directly. But if you want to deploy them in a faster, easier way we will want to grab the updater from the ISO.If you have deployed a new VM the Scale driver ISO is already mounted for you. If you have a new update, just go into the VM management console and mount the ISO there, then you will see it in your VM.
For nearly all systems, all you need is the file called scale-virtio-win-x64.msi. You only need to look at the x86 file if you are dealing with older 32bit VMs.
You can copy this file wherever you need. It's a standard MSI so can be run however you like, deployed via Group Policy, PDQ Deploy or tools like Salt or Ansible.
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A common option for small environments would be to simply include the driver package on a Windows SMB file share in a centrally accessible, read only folder that can be seen from each VM. Then just log into each VM and double click to update! Easy Peasy.
For larger environments, Group Policy will be the most common approach.
