Windows 7 and VMWare

I have had the "distinct" pleasure of building a group of virtual workstations and using different versions of Windows operating systems in their creations. I have some open questions still and have even presented them to VMWare in the hopes they will answer the questions and save me what may turn out to be days of research/trial-and-error. However, I have had some interesting issues and thought I might post them here.

The biggest issue that I had with creating the virtual Windows 7 boxes (AND Windows Server 2008 R2) was that I was getting this error message:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
Before explaining the fix that I "found" for this error, I should probably include the other hardware and software I am working with for this little project:
- 1 ESX Server installed on a Penguin server
- 1 Penguin Desktop - Vista
- 2 Windows 2003 R2 Servers (one for the VMWare vSphere/vCenter Server, one for the VMWare Connection Server
- 1 IGEL Thin Client with both RDP (5 and 6.1) support and VMWare View Client installed.
- ALL VMWare software is at least release 4.0.0.
- Guests (Virtual) OS's
- XP 32-Bit
- XP 64-Bit
- Vista 32-Bit
- Vista 64-Bit
- Windows 7 32-Bit
- Windows 7 64-Bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (HAD to have at least one Linux box. :-) )

So, with all of that, I am in the process of testing different functionalities. The desire is to have a set of virtual workstations that I can push to the thin clients and that support streaming video, bi-directional audio, memory-intensive applications, and all of this with as minimal network impact as possible. I will discuss the overall evaluation results later in this post, or at a later date. :-)

Now back to the Windows 7 installation problem. The error message that I recieved:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
is an artifact of the type of CD/DVD drives and drivers that Windows 7 recognizes during install. This message will actually appear after files have started copying to the local hard drive. That said, this message can be returned to a user under more than one situation, making it a pain to troubleshoot.
If you research this error message, a lot of what you will find is that people automatically assume that it is a bad ISO file. While this could be true, this was not my problem as I was using a disk, not an ISO. However, it may be good to list some of the reasons for this message, and how I determined that they did or did not apply. If you are reading this and just looking for the fix...scroll down further. :-)

Some Causes of the Error Message:
1) Trying to install from a corrupt ISO file.
- This did not apply to me as I was loading from a DVD. However, I will acknowledge that I re-downloaded the ISO and re-burned the DVD a second time just to rule out a bad ISO, and number 2 below.
- If you are using an ISO, there are some things you can do to verify that it is comoplete and not corrupt: Check the Hash value of the ISO, Check the size of the ISO, and do this against the listed Hash and Size values from your download site.
2) A Faulty DVD.
- While this was possible in my case, I ruled it out (See number 1 above).
3) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the host system.
- One would think that this would be the biggest culprit, given the error message. However, the biggest solution found on the net is number 1 above.
- This was in part my problem. When I installed the ESX Server, I didn't give much thought to drivers for hardware as I really didn't know at the time how far I was going with the server itself. Bottom line here is that I need to find a Windows 7 "approved" CD/DVD Driver and install this on the ESX Server. As a side note here, the ESX Server runs on a Linux Kernel (the exact version escapes me right now).
4) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the virtual system.
- This was in fact the other part of my problem. Contrary to popular belief, VMWare vSphere 4.0 is not "perfectly" compatible with Windows 7. In fact, as I may post later, there are some other issues that arose during this evaluation that were specifically related to the lack of complete OS support for Windows 7.

So, HOW did I fix this problem and create some virtual Windows 7 workstations????
I went the LONG way, on purpose (I'll explain in a bit).
THE FIX:
On a seperate machine on my network, I had already had a small virtual network setup inside a VMWare Server. Using this setup, and an ISO of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit, I created two working virtual machines running Windows 7. Once I had created these two, it was a somewhat simple matter of getting the virtual "machine" onto the ESX server.
There are multiple options for transfering a virtual machine to an ESX server.
One option is to FTP directly to the ESX server and upload the virtual machine, and then run the VMWare converter tool. This is not the option that I chose. The ESX server does not come with FTP enabled by default and I did not feel like enabling FTP nor doing some of the things required for security compliance. For those curious, there is an RPM from VMWare for FTP, "vsftp," that can be used.
The method I chose took only slightly more work than FTP'ing directly to the ESX server. However, it was clean and worked. What I did was transfered the virtual machine folder (YES, the WHOLE FOLDER) to the Windows Server 2003 that contained my vCenter Server. After doing this, and I wish I had some screen shots, I logged into the vCenter Server itself using the vSphere Client. Once logged into the vCenter Server, I was able to browse the datastore that exists on the ESX server. Browsing the ESX Datastore through the vCenter server allows for the uploading of a file OR Folder. I obviously chose the folder. After the upload was complete, I browsed into the folder I just uploaded and selected the ".vmx" file. Right-clicking on this file will show the option to "Import this machine." After some conversion time, VOILA, my ESX Server now contained a working virtual machine using Windows 7 Ultimate.

I realize that this might not be the most optimum fix for long term issues requiring Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2. However, it was more important to prove that there was a method, other than FTP, that would allow me to create a virtual machine outside of the ESX Server, and them move it to the ESX Server.