CD-ROMs in VMware

In my experience, after you have added enough NICs to a VMware ESX machine to be useful, i.e. at least 6 to 8, you start to get into a situation whereby ESX is unable to identify a physical CD-ROM that might be attached.

At that point whenever you try to start a Virtual Machine which is configured to try to attach to the physical CD-ROM, it will take an inordinate time to boot. Essentially hanging on the way up. and even after the machine has fully booted. It seems as though the VM is only getting 5 to 10 seconds of CPU every 2 minutes or so.

This can be immensely frustrating.

I know. Before I worked out what was happening, I became quite impatient.

The fix is quite straitforward. Simply change the CD-ROM over to a client device. For often than not, that is the most useful setting. It is still straitforward to map an iso to the drive as well, should you need that.