The guest operating system is extremely slow or does not boot when connected to the host CD/DVD drive

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The virtual machine is extremely slow
• The guest operating system fails to boot
• CPU and disk performance charts for the virtual machine show little or no activity
• The virtual CD/DVD drive is connected to a host device
• In the host vmkernel or messages log, you see a log spew similar to:
  
  May 27 07:42:07 VS2 vmkernel: 21:02:21:57.950 cpu5:4235)ScsiDeviceIO: 1672: Command 0x28 to device "mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x3 0x2 0x0.
  May 27 07:42:13 VS2 vmkernel: 21:02:22:04.455 cpu5:4235)NMP: nmp_CompleteCommandForPath: Command 0x28 (0x41027f3c6640) to NMP device "mpx.vmhba1:C0:T0:L0" failed on physical path "vmhba1:C0:T0:L0" H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x3 0x2 0x0.

Environment

VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0

Resolution

This issue may occur when the device type of the CD/DVD drive is set to Host Device.

To resolve this issue, in the virtual machine settings, ensure that the Device Type of the CD/DVD drives is set to Client Device:

1. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Setting.
2. Set the Device Type to Client Device for the CD/DVD drive.

For more information on connecting DVDs to virtual machines, see the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide.

Additional Information

ESXi/ESX host appears as Not Responding in vCenter Server due to CD/DVD-ROM drive firmware issues