Trouble getting DVD drive working in HP blade enclosure with VMware guest OS (Windows XP)

[whit801]

Hello, I am very new to VMware and am just learning while doing as the saying goes. I am having trouble getting my HP blade enclosure on board DVD drive to connect to the VMware guest OS on any of my blades. I have Windows XP on two of my blades and Windows 2003 server on the third one. None of the blade OS's can connect and use the DVD drive that is onboard the blade enclosure. I can attach the DVD drive to each blade OK with HP Onboard Administrator, and I go ahead and configure the virtual machines to connect to the host DVD drive, but I never am able to use the drive to read a CD. Or, I should say, almost never. At one point it suddenly started working, and I went home thinking my problem was solved, but next morning the problem was back again. Could someone list the steps to attach a host DVD drive to a virtual machine so I could be sure I am doing everything right? Thanks for your help.

[jswt]

Can you verify that its getting mounted in the service console. It may be an issue with the way the blade enclosure attaches the blade to the drive, you may need to go into the service console and verify that the drive is being mounted. Once you have the drive mounted properly then try and present it to the os. Depending on how your fstab is configured it should be as easy as "mount /mnt/cdrom".

[Texiwill]

Hello,

You may want to use a CD off the host you are running the VIC instead of using the blade cdrom. That or an iso file.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

Blue Gears and SearchVMware Pro Blogs: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Blog_Roll

Top Virtualization Security Links: http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Top_Virtualization_Security_Links