adding or deleteing devices greyed out

[fitzie22]

I have an interesting problem, I have an esx server (3.0.2) and there are 10 vm's on it. all win2k3 and all setup the same. One of them I can't add or remove a device (through edit settings) it is just greyed out. I have tried shutting down the vm and it is the same. Now the other 9 are fine and I can add a drive or remove the cdrom with no problem. Any ideas?? off VC 2.0.2

[vmPUNK]

i had the same problem runnign 3.5/2.5 but didnt have a chance to troubleshoot as i had to bounce the host, when i did my vm became manageable again

try removing and adding it back to inventory

[weinstein5]

try restarting the mgmt-vmware service - using the command service mgmt-vmware restart

[VMKR9]

Check for any permission changes on the vm in virtual center??

[dilpz]

This happened to me before when a colleague shared a physical CD-ROM drive out to install to a VM and the connection then dropped, stopping any configuration changes to the VM. All I could do is reboot the host. This solved the problem.

[oreeh]

Shutting down the VM, unregistering and re-registering it should work as well.

[fitzie22]

I have tried all the suggestions here with no avail except the rebooting of the esx server. I can't do that now. the last one was the one I was not 100 percent about. as far as unregistering adn re-registering. I removed the vm from inventory in VC and then browsed teh datastore adn right clicked the .vmx file adn said add to inventory. let me know if I did this wrong.

[oreeh]

That's what I meant.

[VMKR9 · Accepted solution]

yes that is the correct way. One other thing, was this vm an upgrade from a previous version, if you right click is there upgrade virtual hardware? that would grey out the devices...

[fitzie22]

That was it. I was new to this VC instance and I guess there was an old clone out there that I imaged. SO i just needed to upgrade the virtual hardware.Thanks for all your help

[ecorrea]

In my case I am running a VMware Host in an IBM Bladecenter. These bladecenter have shared CD rom devices so it was moved to another blade at some point. So I moved it back to the host and still could not add a CD to the VM Guest. It was greyed out. I then restarted the VMWare Host Agent service as I'm running this on top of Windows 2003 64bit OS and it solved the problem. I was then able to add a CD rom to my Guest OS.