Performing a hot add of virtual hardware to an existing virtual machine

One of the greatest benefits of virtualization is the ability to give a virtual machine a hardware upgrade without buying new hardware. Since each virtual machine only uses a portion of the host's available resources, you can reconfigure the virtual machine and add additional hardware. You can add a USB controller, a CD drive, additional hard disks, SCSI controllers, vCPUs, and RAM to the virtual machines that have already been configured.

In the past, adding CPU and RAM to a virtual machine was a task that had to be done while the VM was offline, but increasingly, guest operating systems are establishing support for hot add, which means that administrators can increase the ...

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