connecting an external USB DVD drive

[dchhaya]

Hello.

I am trying to connect an external USB dvd drive to a B200 series and i am not able to get it to work with VMware. Is there any different way to make this work.

Deep.

[rewilkin]

Deep,

Can you give more details on "why" you are trying to connect an external drive?

Of course you have the virtual KVM on each blade.

Are you using the "dongle" that came with the gear?

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[dchhaya]

hi.

  thanks for the reply. does it work the same way as an external DVD drive?

Deep.

[Robert Burns]

External USB DVD/CD-ROM drive is what I was referring to.

[Robert Burns]

Greetings Deep,

If you have a powered on ESX host and plug in a USB CD-ROM, it will not be mounted.  By default only the virtual CD-ROM will be mounted & ready to use with your UCS blades.  If you want to use a separate external CD-ROM you have a couple options of configuring this.

1. Boot the ESX host while the USB  CD-ROM is connected.  This will allow the device to be mountable to your guest VMs.  You'll have Host devices

    "scd0" and "scd1" available from the Host CD-Rom drop down.

2. Manually mount the device while the host is running.   See instructions below.

2a. When you plug in the device you'll get a notice that a device was connect usually "scd0" or "scd1".  From here you need to mount the device.

2b. To find out the device ID enter the command

ll /dev | grep cdrom

Your CDROM will be either /dev/scd0 or /scd1 - accoridng to which it was detected in the previous step.

2c. Mount the device with

mount -t iso9660 /dev/scdx /mnt/cdrom  (where x = the device ID above)

2d. Now from your VM running on this host, go "Edit Settings" and select "Host Device".  You will probably have two options, one for scd0 and scd1.

Select the appropriate one and you should have access to the USB CD-ROM via your Guest VM.

Regards,

Robert