attaching an iso image as a cd/dvd

[AmmarSM]

hi

i installed ESXi how can i attach an iso image of windows as a cd/dvd because i have the image on a usb had drive and in

vSphere Client it doesn't show the the host usb drive just the hard disk and it name it datastore and another vmware drive dont

know maybe its a virtual one so how to accomplish this task

Regards

[ChrisDearden]

I think you would be better putting that USB disk into your client machine and copying the iso image up to the datastore ( using the datastore browser ). you'll be able to attach it from there. I dont think ESX will read the NTFS/FAT formatted USB stick you've stuck in it.

[briwag]

If you have vCenter up and running you may be able to configure VMDirectpath to pass the USB device along to the guest through the host. If you have blade servers it may not be possible, but for a standard rack mount server, it should work.

As Chris said, the best way to accomplish this would be to copy the ISO to the datastore. I normally do this by copying the ISO to the machine I am running the vCenter Client from, them upload to the Datastore from there.

You could always burn the ISO to a disk and stick it in the host CD/DVD drive.

[davidkillingswo]

Thanks for this tip.

I was trying to figure out how to get an .iso image of Windows 2008 R2 server that was stored onto a USB thumb drive to install in a virtual machine.

I couldn't figure out how to get the virtual machine to recognize the USB drive on boot.

Copying the ISO image to a data store, and setting the CD/DVD drive to use the ISO image on the datastore did the trick!!!