Booting vm from CD/DVD

[jwall04]

I'm trying to install a guest OS by booting to the hosts CD/DVD drive. In the vm's settings I have given it a CD/DVD Drive of Client type and set it to Emulate IDE (I read somewhere that you need to do this for SATA drives), started the vm, entered the BIOS and set the CD/DVD to be tge first boot device, connected the CD/DVD but it doesn't find it.

Interestingly, if I try to set the CD/DVD as a Host type (as opposed to Client) then it says there are no devices detected. Is ESX not detecting the SATA drive, or am I missing something?

Thanks for the help.

[weinstein5]

First question is the connect at power on box checked in cd/dvd setting - this is easily overlooked? Have you tried creating an ISO image form the cd and booting form that?

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[jwall04]

The option to enable "Connect at power on" is greyed out when the Device Type is set to Client Device. If I set the type to Host Device then I can enable "Connect at power on", but in the drop-down there are no host devices to choose from, it says "No devices available" which I why I'm thinking ESX is not detectiing the SATA CD/DVD drive.

Do you know how I can verify this? On the Configuration tab of the Host it lists the Health Status, Processors, Memory etc, but no CD/DVD drive. Is this a problem?

I haven't tried creating an ISO yet, how do I get it inot the VMFS partition once I create it?

Also, when I installed ESXi it created one large VMFS partition, assuming I want to create 2 virtual servers eventually, do I want to break that up into multiple partitions, and if so how to I do that?

Thanks for the help again.

[Scott-P]

I used ISO's in the past when I had a remote site - never had to go there to put a CD in that way.

Connect to the host via something like WinSCP (or any SCP client) and place the ISO whereever the host can get to it. You may want to put it on a shared storage area if you use that so other hosts can use it in the future.

[khughes · Accepted solution]

Using the Client Device has never worked that great for me, creating an ISO file has always worked the best and the fastest. To upload it you can use a program like WinSCP or in the VIC client, if you open the datastore you want to upload it to, there is a button that looks like disks with an up arrow that say upload files from your local PC and you can use that.

Also if you wanted to make multiple VM's, using 1 vmfs partition is just fine. We use large 1.5TB VMFS partitions with 8-10+ VM's on each one and they run fine, I'm sure your single VMFS partition could hold 2-4+ depending on size and disk speed.

• Kyle

[jwall04]

Thanks for all the speedy replies. Kyle, I used the VI client to transfer the ISOs, but now I'm not sure how to delete a test directory I created...

Ok, so I'll stick with the one partition, but how would I create more if I wanted to?

Jeff