Compliance warning on VMs regarding floppy drives - but theres no floppy on the vm

[kjstech]

I have this warning "symptom VM.disconnect-devices-floppy - Floppy drive connected (5.5/6.5 Security Configuration Guide) has been observed" on a ton of VM's in our ESXi 6.7u3 environment. I want to make it go away so I tried checking the configuration of the VM's in question, but there's no floppy drive added at all. I see the following on most:

CPU
Memory
Hard disk 1
SCSI controller 0
Network adapter 1
CD/DVD drive 1
Video card
VMCI device
Other
Controllers - PCI controller 0
IDE 0
IDE 1
PS2 controller 0
SIO controller 0

SCSI Adapters
SCSI controller 0

Input Devices
Keyboard
Pointing device

 

So I then tried powering off a non-critical VM to see if any NEW options appeared in the powered-off state, and no, there's no floppy drive at all. I then tried going into the VM Options tab > Advanced > EDIT CONFIGURATION... to see if there was any term for floppy in there I could set to FALSE or disable. Didn't see anything.

Any idea why vRealize Operations Manager is triggering these warnings on machines that don't appear to have a floppy in their settings?

I then tried booting into the BIOS of the VM and I found in the I/O section you can disable the serial, parallel and floppy drives.  However even a few hours later vrops still shows this warning.  Any ideas?

 

 

[a_p_]

Out of curiosity, did you check the VM's settings from both, the vCenter Server UI as well as from an ESXi host's UI itself?
Do the VMs' .vmx files contain any "floppy" entries?

André

[kjstech]

Ok I've tried two different things and vrops still shows this alert.  I don't know if its just going to take time and will remove itself or if for some reason its stuck on.  Maybe you can show me if theres a way to take a particular alert and delete it so its not reported.

 

First way, in the VM I chose to boot into the bios.  In the bios on the second screen under I/O Configuration, I disabled the serial, parallel and floppy drives.  Don't need any of that stuff.  When the particular Windows VM booted, sure enough, there was no floppy drive nor floppy drive controller in Device Manager.  This was done last night.  This morning I checked and the alert is still there.  So next I logged into the particular ESXi host where this VM is running.  Your right, it shows Floppy drive 1 but the drop-down next to it is blank. Also under it it says  "Not supported Client Floppy devices are not supported when using the VMware Host Client. If you wish to use a client device, please use the vSphere Web Client. This device will be ignored."

I powered down the VM and then checked its config again direct on the ESXi host.  I was able to then hit the X and remove the line item entry for Floppy drive 1.  Why this doesn't show up in vSphere  6.7 client is beyond me.  I powered it back on but the alert still shows.  I'm not sure if this is something that takes a few hours for vrops to "refresh" or what.

The newer style web ui just doesn't show it at all. I'll see in a bit if that warning goes away on this machine. If so, then I have a solution. But what an annoying one.... to connect to all 8 of our ESXi hosts directly and have to power them off to remove it. What a crock. Sometimes VMWare's design decisions completely blow me away (and not in a good way).

[kjstech]

I looked into which filesystem this vm's hard disk is on and then browsed to that datastore / folder and downloaded its .vmx file.

 

I see these lines in it:

floppy0.startConnected = "FALSE"
floppy0.clientDevice = "TRUE"
floppy0.fileName = "vmware-null-remote-floppy"

If I removed the floppy on the host, why didn't it write back to the vmx file?  Sounds like a bug that should be reported.  Do vmware employees read this forum for concerns, suggestions, comments, bugs, etc..., or should I open a case?

[kjstech]

SR 22293345301 was created for this issue.

 

When theres a bug, vmware needs to know about it.

[sbarutas]

Open a powershell

 

Connect-VIServer -Server your_vcenter_ip

--Provide login

Get-VM | Get-FloppyDrive | Select Parent, Name, ConnectionState

--the above will list all the vm with floppy

$VMtoRemoveFloppy = Get-FloppyDrive -VM VMname_here

--The above set as variable the vm which you want to remove the floppy

Remove-FloppyDrive -Floppy $VMtoRemoveFloppy -Confirm:$false

--The above will remove the floppy from the vm. The VM should be powered OFF.

 

 

 

Cheeers !!!