Vmware Cd Dvd Drive Not Connecting
Rachelle Shriver
After several of my readers sent me emails asking me about this scenario, I realized it was not as trivial as Ithought it would be. For some reason, installing operating systems that require more than one ISO image turnedout to be somewhat of a difficulty for quite a few people. Not to worry, we'll get this thing sorted out soon.
In this short tutorial, you will learn that treating virtual CD-ROM devices is absolutely no different fromusing physical CD/DVD tray. When it comes to installing operating systems that span over several files, thecore concept remains unchanged. However, instead of working with actual hardware, you work with software.That's all.
Let's say you want to install one of the latter version of CentOS, at number 5.5,which comes as a big, handsome set of no less than eight ISO image files. You can burn these to CDs and thenbreak in the eject button on your CD tray. But what if your ESXi machine does not have a CD tray, and what ifyou are connecting remotely and can't have physical access to the box? You will have to work with ISO images.
In the Properties window, under CD/DVD drive options, simply change the Datastore ISO file you are using. Thiscan be local or remote storage, it makes no difference. For all practical purposes, your virtual machine willthink you're just swapping discs in and out.
There isn't much left to say. Sometimes, trivial things may appear to be difficulty or convoluted to get setupand running. Sometimes, trivial really means trivial. While the overall installation process from multiple ISOimages via remote connection to a hypervisor is not an ordinary thing, the procedure is quite straightforward.You must need to change the pointer to the correct ISO file in the datastore and let the virtual machine guestoperating system continue its work.
That would be all. If you're interested, you may also want to take a look at my cloning tutorial and the tips andtricks guide for ESXi. Stay tuned for additional articles. We have yet to unravel the secrets of the VMwarecommand line. That should be interesting.
The main function of a hypervisor is to emulate devices used by VMs at the software level. Devices are created in a VM, whether virtual controllers, disks, DVD-ROM, video cards, network cards, input devices, etc. But what if you want to connect a printer, scanner, USB flash drive, USB hard disk drive, USB smart card reader, security dongles, USB license keys, etc.?
For external physical devices with a USB interface, you can attach them to a VM running on VMware Workstation or an ESXi server by using the USB passthrough feature. This blog post covers using this feature in VMware vSphere on ESXi hosts, including requirements and the steps for connecting USB devices.
VMware USB device passthrough is a feature that allows you to connect a physical USB device attached to a USB port of a physical ESXi server to a virtual machine as if the USB device was connected to a virtual machine directly. VMware passthrough is a feature available starting with ESXi 4.1.
The arbitrator is a dedicated service on an ESXi server. The arbitrator scans physical USB devices attached to the physical server and is responsible for USB device traffic routing between a physical host and a virtual machine. Only one VM can access the USB device at a time. Access to the USB device connected to one VM is blocked for other VMs. The USB arbitrator supports up to 15 USB controllers (vSphere 7.0). The Arbitrator service is enabled on ESXi by default.
A USB controller used on a physical ESXi server is the controller to which physical USB ports are connected. The physical USB controller works with physical USB devices inserted into the physical USB ports of the server. USB controllers can be onboard (they are also called integrated and are built-in on a chip in a motherboard) or external (implemented as PCI or PCIe cards that are inserted into the appropriate slots on a motherboard of a server). The onboard USB controller acts as a bridge between a USB bus and a PCIe (or PCI) bus. The onboard USB controller is physically connected by the appropriate number of PCIe lanes to a chipset on a motherboard.
A virtual USB controller is an emulated device created especially for a virtual machine running on a hypervisor. A virtual USB controller interacts with a physical USB controller when you passthrough a physical USB device from a physical ESXi server to a guest OS on the VM. Presence of a virtual USB controller in VM configuration is required to use the USB passthrough feature on the VM. A maximum of eight virtual USB controllers can be connected to a VM on an ESXi host. If you need to remove a virtual USB controller from a VM configuration, you have to remove all USB devices connected to that controller first. VMware USB driver is installed in a guest OS after adding a virtual USB controller to VM configuration.
USB 3.0 is available for ESXi servers starting from VMware vSphere 5.5 patch 3. The xHCI USB controller is required in VM configuration for this purpose. OS requirements to use USB 3.0 passthrough are: Windows 8.1 or higher, Windows Server 2012 R2 or higher, or Linux with Linux kernel 2.6.35 or higher. USB 3.1 devices are supported on their maximum speed since VMware vSphere 7.0
Disconnect USB devices from a VM before using the hot-add feature and adding CPU, memory, or PCI devices. Otherwise USB devices are disconnected automatically, and when you use the hot-add feature, some data can be lost. If you suspend a VM and then resume the VM, USB devices are disconnected and then reconnected to the VM again.
As for creating a VMware virtual USB drive or virtual flash drive for attaching to a virtual machine running on ESXi or VMware Workstation, just like you would mount a virtual floppy disk or CD/DVD disc, currently this option is not possible.
If your ESXi server has a USB controller inserted into a PCI slot, you can passthrough this PCI device to a virtual machine. VMware PCI passthrough is also called VMDirectPass. This method is less convenient than using USB passthrough but can help you get the task done.
Intel Directed I/O or AMD I/O Virtualization Technology (AMD IOMMU) must be supported by server hardware and enabled in UEFI/BIOS. If you have only one USB controller in your server, you should attach an additional USB controller to avoid losing connections to USB devices used by your physical ESXi server.
PCSCD is the ESXi daemon that controls smart card readers. Access to USB smart cards is disabled for virtual machines to avoid conflicts because a smart card is needed by an ESXi server. As a result, you cannot use USB passthrough with default configuration for USB smart cards. You need to edit the configuration of the ESXi host to enable USB passthrough for USB smart cards.
You can connect diverse devices attached to USB ports of physical ESXi servers to virtual machines directly and use them in guest operating systems of VMs just like you use these USB devices on regular physical computers. You can even migrate virtual machines using external USB devices connected to the parent ESXi host with vMotion to another host. Despite some limitations, the VMware USB passthrough feature adds more capabilities and flexibility in different situations.
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Version 6.0 of pyVmomi has some problems with SSL error handling on certainversions of Python. If using version 6.0 of pyVmomi, the machine that youare running the proxy minion process from must have either Python 2.7.9 ornewer This is due to an upstream dependency in pyVmomi 6.0 that is not supportedin Python version 2.6 to 2.7.8. If the version of Python running the salt-cloudcommand is not in the supported range, you will need to install an earlier versionof pyVmomi. See Issue #29537 for more information.
pyVmomi doesn't expose the ability to specify the locale when connecting toVMware. This causes parsing issues when connecting to an instance of VMwarerunning under a non-English locale. Until this feature is added upstreamIssue #38402 contains a workaround.
The provider parameter in cloud provider configuration was renamed to driver.This change was made to avoid confusion with the provider parameter that isused in cloud profile configuration. Cloud provider configuration now uses driverto refer to the salt-cloud driver that provides the underlying functionality toconnect to a cloud provider, while cloud profile configuration continues to useprovider to refer to the cloud provider configuration that you define.
Enter the CD/DVD drive specification here. If the CD/DVD drive doesn't exist,it will be created with the specified configuration. If the CD/DVD drivealready exists, it will be reconfigured with the specifications. The followingoptions can be specified per CD/DVD drive:
Enter the path to the iso file present on the datastore only ifdevice_type: datastore_iso_file. The syntax to specify this isiso_path: "[datastoreName] vmimages/tools-isoimages/linux.iso". Thisfield is ignored if device_type: client_device
Enter the mode of connection only if device_type: client_device. Currentlysupported modes are passthrough and atapi. This field is ignored ifdevice_type: datastore_iso_file. Default is mode: passthrough
Enter the disk specification here. If the hard disk doesn't exist, it willbe created with the provided size. If the hard disk already exists, it willbe expanded if the provided size is greater than the current size of the disk.
Enter the network adapter specification here. If the network adapter doesn'texist, a new network adapter will be created with the specified network name,type and other configuration. If the network adapter already exists, it willbe reconfigured with the specifications. The following additional options canbe specified per network adapter (See example above):
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