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Hi,<br />
<br />
When you say boot automatically to CD-ROM are these VMs created from Scratch by doing a manual install or are you moving the VMs from physical to virtual.<br />
<br />
Because by default when the VMs are created by default they are set to boot from CD-ROM. <br />
<br />
bhanu
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From scratch, and the first boot device is not defaulting to CD-ROM.
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Freshly created VMs will boot from the virtual cdrom device upon the first boot. On later boots the cdrom device will not be the first boot device unless you change it manually in the virtual machines BIOS.<br />
<br />
Lars
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Hi<br />
<br />
as said by larstr if you have booted the VM for the first time without pointing to a iso image on a datastore or a physical cd on the esx host or the virtual center host the bios gets set to boot in the order of &quot;removable device&quot; &quot;hard disk&quot; &quot;Cd-rom&quot;. This results in the VM not booting at all.<br />
<br />
So you need to hit F2 when the vm reboots and change the boot sequence in the VM's bios set the &quot;cd-rom&quot; as the first preffered drive. You can highlight the first device and press the &quot;-&quot; key to decrese the priority and get the cdrom as the first boot device. But ensure that you have a bootable cd.<br />
<br />
<br />
bhanu 
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OK we'll try it out and reply soon, thanks for the feedback!
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Ariesser,<br />
<br />
This worked for me as well, should help cut down on a lot e-mails here. Thank you (And to all the other members who replied as well)!
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We are in the process of upgrading all of our clusters to VMWare 3.5. Is there a way to configure new VMs to boot automatically to CD-ROM as opposed to having to go into the virtual BIOS and manually change the boot order?
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We are in the process of upgrading all of our clusters to VMWare 3.5. Is there a way to configure new VMs to boot automatically to CD-ROM as opposed to having to go into the virtual BIOS and manually change the boot order?

Setting New VMs to Boot from CD-ROM Automatically

VMware, a software company founded in 1998,  was one of the first commercially successful companies to offer x86 virtualization. The storage company EMC purchased VMware in 1994. Dell Technologies acquired EMC in 2016. VMware’s parent company is now Dell Technologies.

VMware has many software products that run on desktops, Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, which allows the virtualizing of the x86 architecture.  Its enterprise software hypervisor for servers, VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on the server hardware and does not require an additional underlying operating system.