Physical USB CD-ROM devices attached to ESX/ESXi hosts are not listed as available choices for adding SCSI passthrough devices to a virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Physical USB CD and DVD-ROM devices that are attached to an ESX/ESXi host are passed through to the virtual machine as SCSI devices rather than USB devices. If you add these devices to the ESX/ESXi host while the host is running, the expected SCSI device driver does not appear in the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box. You cannot hot add (or remove) USB CD and DVD-ROM devices to an ESX/ESXi host.

The virtual media in some modern Remote Management utilities behave in the same way as USB CD and DVD-ROM devices. You cannot hot add or remove such devices.

Environment

VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESX 4.1.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Resolution

For the correct SCSI device to appear, you must restart the ESX/ESXi host daemon. If you are connected to a standalone instance of ESX/ESXi, the connection to the server is interrupted while hostd is being restarted.

1. Log in to the ESX service console or the ESXi server console as root.
2. Restart the host daemon.

Host	Restart Command
ESXi	/etc/init.d/hostd restart
ESX	/etc/init.d/mgmt-vmware restart

 

The new host daemon process starts and the correct SCSI device driver is available in the vSphere Client toolbar menu.