How to Add a DVD or CD Drive to a Virtual Machine

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Applies To: Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

You can add a virtual DVD or CD drive to an IDE bus with the following procedure. By default, all hardware profiles include a built-in IDE drive. You can use this procedure when creating a hardware profile, modifying a hardware profile, or configuring hardware profile settings from the New Template Wizard or the New Virtual Machine Wizard.

To add a virtual DVD drive for a virtual machine to the IDE bus

  1. In the left pane, under Bus Configuration, click IDE Devices, and then click DVD on the top menu.

  2. In the results pane, under Virtual DVD Drive, select an entry from the Channel drop-down list box to specify a channel to which to attach this virtual DVD drive.

  3. Under Capture mode, select one of the following options:

    • No media (default). Select this option to specify that the virtual DVD drive cannot read any media. If you are modifying an existing hardware profile, you can select No Media to disconnect the virtual DVD drive from a host drive or ISO file.

    • Physical CD/DVD drive. If you want to enable a virtual DVD drive on the virtual machine to connect to a physical CD or DVD drive on the host, select this option. This option enables the virtual DVD drive to read a physical CD or DVD disk on the host.

    • Existing image file. Select this option if you want to enable the virtual DVD drive on a virtual machine to access a specific image stored in a library share on a Virtual Machine Manager library server. Click Browse to display the Select ISO dialog box, and then select the image to be inserted into the virtual DVD drive.

      Share image file instead of copying it. Select this option to save space on a virtual machine that is created by using a stored image file instead of attaching a copy of the image to the virtual machine.

      To make this option available for Hyper-V virtual machines, you must configure both share and NTFS permissions on the library share that stores the image files, and you must configure constrained delegation between the library server and the host. Also, the VMM service must be running under an Active Directory domain account. For procedures, see How to Enable Shared ISO Images for Hyper-V Virtual Machines in VMM.

      VMM 2008 does not support shared ISO images for self-service users. Instead, VMM 2008 attaches a copy of the ISO image file to the new virtual machine. VMM 2008 R2 supports shared ISO images for self-service users.

See Also

Concepts

Creating Virtual Machines
How to Configure the Floppy Drive for a Virtual Machine
How to Modify the Properties of a Hardware Profile