Adding a New Device

This section provides information on adding new devices to your virtual machines. You can add new virtual devices to your virtual machine using the pctl set command. The options responsible for adding particular devices are listed in the following table:

Option Name	Description
`hdd`	Adds a new hard disk drive to the virtual machine. You can either connect an existing image to the virtual machine or create a new one.
`cdrom`	Adds a new CD/DVD-ROM drive to the virtual machine.
`net`	Adds a new network adapter to the virtual machine.
`fdd`	Adds a new floppy disk drive to the virtual machine.
`serial`	Adds a new serial port to the virtual machine.
`parallel`	Adds a new parallel port to the virtual machine.
`sound`	Adds a new sound device to the virtual machine.
`usb`	Adds a new USB controller to the virtual machine.

For example, you can execute the following command to add a new virtual disk to the MyVM virtual machine:

# pctl set MyVM --device-add hdd

Creating hdd1 (+) scsi:0 image='/var/parallels/MyVM.pvm/harddisk1.hdd

Create the expanding disk, 32768Mb...

The VM has been successfully configured.

This command creates a new virtual disk with the following default parameters:

name: hdd1
disk type: SCSI
image file name and location: /var/parallels/MyVM.pvm/harddisk1.hdd
disk format: expanding
disk capacity: 32768 MB

You can redefine some of these parameters by specifying specific options during the command execution. For example, to create an IDE virtual disk that will have the capacity of 64 GB, you can run this command:

# pctl set MyVM --device-add hdd --size 64000 --iface ide

Creating hdd1 (+) ide:1 image='/var/parallels/MyVM.pvm/harddisk1.hdd

Create the expanding disk, 64000Mb...

The VM has been successfully configured.

The virtual disk has been added to your virtual machine. However, before starting to use it, you must initialize the disk. Refer to the next subsection for information on how you can do it.

When managing devices, keep in mind the following:

Detailed information on all options that can be passed to pctl set when creating a new virtual machine device is provided in the Parallels Command Line Reference Guide .
You can connect up to 4 IDE devices and up to 15 SCSI devices (virtual disks or CD/DVD-ROM drives) to a virtual machine.
If you want to use an existing image file as a virtual CD/DVD-ROM drive, keep in mind that Parallels Server Bare Metal supports .iso , .cue , .ccd and .dmg (non-compressed and non-encrypted) image files.
A virtual machine can have only one floppy disk drive.
A virtual machine can have up to 16 virtual network adapters.
A virtual machine can have up to four serial ports.
A virtual machine can have up to three parallel ports.
Any virtual machine can have only one sound device.
A virtual machine can have only one USB controller.

In This Section

Initializing the Newly Added Disk

Top of page

Feedback