You can use Workstation Pro to add devices to virtual machines, including DVD and CD-ROM drives, floppy drives, USB controllers, virtual and physical hard disks, parallel and serial ports, generic SCSI devices, and processors. You can also modify settings for existing devices.
Configuring DVD, CD-ROM, and Floppy Drives You can add up to four IDE devices, up to 60 SCSI devices, and up to 120 SATA devices (four controllers with 30 devices per controller) to a virtual machine. Any of these devices can be connected to a physical or virtual CD-ROM or DVD device. CD-ROM and DVD devices cannot be connected to an NVMe controller.
Configuring a USB Controller A virtual machine must have a USB controller to use USB devices and smart card readers. To use a smart card reader, a virtual machine must have a USB controller regardless of whether the smart card reader is actually a USB device.
Configuring and Maintaining Virtual Hard Disks You can use Workstation Pro to configure virtual hard disk storage for virtual machines.
Adding a Physical Disk to a Virtual Machine In some circumstances, you might need to give a virtual machine direct access to a physical disk or unused partition on the host computer.
Configuring Virtual Ports You can add virtual parallel (LPT) ports and virtual serial (COM) ports to a virtual machine. A Workstation Pro virtual machine can use up to three parallel ports and up to four virtual serial ports.
Configuring Generic SCSI Devices The generic SCSI feature gives the guest operating system direct access to SCSI devices that are connected to the host system, including scanners, tape drives, and other data storage devices. A virtual machine can use the generic SCSI driver to run any SCSI device that is supported by the guest operating system.
Configuring Virtual Trusted Platform Module Devices You can add a virtual cryptoprocessor that uses Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology to an encrypted virtual machine. Afterward, you can remove the cryptoprocessor from the virtual machine.
Configuring Sixteen-Way Virtual Symmetric Multiprocessing With virtual symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), you can assign processors and cores per processor to a virtual machine on any host system that has at least two logical processors.
Configuring Keyboard Features You can change key combinations for hot-key sequences in Workstation Pro and the language for the keyboard that VNC clients use. You can also configure platform-specific keyboard features for Windows and Linux host systems.
Modify Hardware Settings for a Virtual Machine You can modify memory, processor, virtual and physical hard disk, CD-ROM and DVD drive, floppy drive, virtual network adapter, USB controller, sound card, serial port, generic SCSI device, printer, and display settings for a virtual machine.