Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Changing Virtual Machine Hardware
In most cases, modifying a VM requires that the VM be powered off. There are exceptions
to this rule, as shown in Figure 9.24. You can hot-add a USB controller, a SATA controller, an
Ethernet adapter, a hard disk, or a SCSI device. Later you'll see that some guest OSes also sup-
port the addition of virtual CPUs or RAM while they are powered on as well.
Figure 9.24
Users can add some
types of hardware
while the VM is
powered on. If vir-
tual hardware can-
not be added while
the VM is powered
on, the operation
will fail.
When you're adding new virtual hardware to a VM using the vSphere Web Client, the
screens are similar to the screens used while creating a VM. For example, to add a new virtual
hard disk to an existing VM, you would use the New Device drop-down box at the bottom of
the Virtual Machine Edit Settings dialog box. You can see in Figure 9.24 that it is possible to add
a virtual hard disk to a VM while it is powered on. From there, the vSphere Web Client uses
the same steps shown in Figure 9.11, Figure 9.12, and Figure 9.13 earlier in this chapter. The only
difference is that now you're adding a new virtual hard disk to an existing VM. As an example,
we'll go through the steps to add an Ethernet adapter to a VM (the steps are the same regardless
of whether the VM is actually running).
Perform the following steps to add an Ethernet adapter to a VM:
1.
Launch the vSphere Web Client, and connect to a vCenter Server instance or use the
vSphere Client to connect to an individual ESXi host.
2.
If you aren't already in an inventory view that displays VMs, switch to the Hosts And
Clusters or VMs And Templates view using the Home
➢
Inventories menu.
3.
Right-click the VM to which you want to add the Ethernet adapter, and select Edit
Settings.
4.
Select the New Device drop-down box at the bottom of the screen and select Network.
Click the Add button next to the New Device drop-down box to add the Ethernet adapter
to the virtual machine.
