I do this a lot (old test equipment) and have about a 50% success rate. There are many corners of ethernet, RS232, etc that aren't emulated very well by the vir

I do this a lot (old test equipment) and have about a 50% success rate. There are many corners of ethernet, RS232, etc that aren't emulated very well by the virtual hardware. Timings, side-channels, and permissions are the major offenders. Permissions especially compound the problem because host security mechanisms intentionally override VM security mechanisms. For instance, last weekend I had to figure out how to get RARP packets through the windows firewall, and even though I eventually got the setup working the complexity was not encapsulated by the virtual machine abstraction.