Physical CD drive - swapping discs needs reboot?

[tin]

Is there some reason I need to shut down a guest that is using the physical cd drive if i want to change discs? Is this a limitation of KVM or Proxmox? Or is it something odd about Windows Server 2008?

 

[tom]

works here. post your software version, 'pveversion -v'

 

[tin]

proxmox:~# pveversion -v
pve-manager: 1.9-26 (pve-manager/1.9/6567)
running kernel: 2.6.32-6-pve
proxmox-ve-2.6.32: 1.9-55+ovzfix-1
pve-kernel-2.6.32-6-pve: 2.6.32-55+ovzfix-1
qemu-server: 1.1-32
pve-firmware: 1.0-14
libpve-storage-perl: 1.0-19
vncterm: 0.9-2
vzctl: 3.0.29-3pve1
vzdump: 1.2-16
vzprocps: 2.0.11-2
vzquota: 3.0.11-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 0.15.0-2
ksm-control-daemon: 1.0-6

I noticed this issue first a few weeks ago when we installed Windows 2008 R2 on a VM, then tried to install some other software off CDs. We got the listing of the Windows CD when we swapped the CDs.

 

[mmenaz]

Have you tried to select the VM, go to Hardware tab, click on the CD-ROM hardware, and in the new form you select CD-ROM: "eject" and then Apply. Then insert the new CD-ROM and select CD-ROM device again and Apply. Btw, I usually "import" the iso with dd to have the needed cdrom handy (like dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/var/lib/vz/template/iso/mynicename.iso)
.

 

[tin]

Yeah. Tried that today and it didn't work - had to shut down the VM and start it again.

 

[tin]

OK, I've now had a play with my home server (Dell R515) and it goes even worse at this... The tray gets locked once the VM is started, so I can't even try to eject the disk. Attempting to eject from Win2K8 simply gives an error that the drive is in use (which it wasn't).

Is this normal behavior? Is it KVM or Proxmox that does it?

Edit: Just read an article talking about using ISCSI to use the burning capability in a guest... That would be a suitable workaround for this, right? Any downsides?