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How to make a USB CD drive available to VMs as a USB device under ESXi 5.5

Hi folks:

I discovered a possible problem with ESXi 5.5 that I'm hoping someone knows a way around.  I plugged in a USB CD/DVD drive into a running ESXi 5.5 host with the expectation that I would be able to assign it to a VM as a USB device.  However, it didn't show as an available USB device.  It also didn't show as host device that I could assign to a virtual CD/DVD device.  I rebooted the host and then the USB CD/DVD drive did show up as a host device that I could assign to a virtual CD/DVD device.  The problem of course is that I don't want to have to reboot the host every time I want to connect a physical CD/DVD drive to a VM, and I also don't want to leave the USB CD/DVD drive connected to the host all the time as I use it for other things as well (the host doesn't have it's own CD/DVD drive).   

So I guess my question is:

1).  Is there a way to tell ESXi that an newly connected USB CD/DVD drive is intended to be a USB device that can be connected to VMs,   or

2).  Is there a way to force ESXi to rescan the USB devices for USB CD/DVD drives on demand and make them available as a host device to be assigned to a virtual CD/DVD device without doing a reboot?

I'm hoping that there are some configuration settings I don't know about which control this behavior.

Suggestions welcome.

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