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Disabling the HotAdd/HotPlug capability in ESX/ESXi 4.x and ESXi 5.0 virtual machines

Symptoms

  • NICs and SCSI controllers appear as removable devices.
  • The Safely Remove Hardware option for the virtual hardware appears in the Windows System Tray.

Purpose

 This article describes how to disable the HotPlug capability on removable devices.

Resolution

You can disable the HotPlug capability using vSphere Client or by editing the .vmx file.
 
Note: You can disable the HotPlug capability for PCI devices such as e1000 or vmxnet2 NICs.
 
To disable the HotPlug capability using vSphere Client:
  1. Connect vSphere Client to ESX or vCenter Server.
  2. Power off the virtual machine.
  3. Right-click the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
  4. Click the Options tab.
  5. Click General > Configuration Parameters > Add Row.
  6. Insert a new row with the name devices.hotplug and value false.
  7. Power on the virtual machine
To disable the HotPlug capability by editing the .vmx file:
  1. Power off the virtual machine.
  2. Access the ESX service console using an SSH client.
  3. Open the virtual machine configuration file (.vmx) in a text editor. The default location is /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<vm_name>/<vm_name>.vmx.
  4. Add the line:

    devices.hotplug = "false"
    Note: This setting does not interfere with HotPlug CPU/memory.

  5. Save the file.
  6. Power on the virtual machine.

Tags

virtual-machine-hotplug-device

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