I needed to mount a CDROM drive in order to grab older NIC drivers for my Motherboard. It has 2 Intel 82573L Gigabit Ethernet Controllers onboard. VMware stopped support for these as of ESXi 5.0. This requires using esxcli software install vib commands in order to roll back the VMware driver bootbank to an older VIB for the Intel e1000e NIC driver. Given that my system has two onboard NICs and no room for expansion, I cannot mount anything over the network to grab the drivers. A chicken and egg scenario. CDROM it is!
This worked for me on ESXi 5.5. I remember doing it in the past with 5.1 as well.
To find the device reference of your CDROM:
esxcfg-mpath -l
Example output:
ide.vmhba0-ide.0:0-mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0
Runtime Name: vmhba0:C0:T0:L0
Device: mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0
Device Display Name: Local TEAC CD-ROM (mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0)
Adapter: vmhba0 Channel: 0 Target: 0 LUN: 0
Adapter Identifier: ide.vmhba0
Target Identifier: ide.0:0
Plugin: NMP
State: active
Transport: ide
Load the iso9660 module with this command:
vmkload_mod iso9660
Mount the CDROM using the device determined earlier with esxcfg-mpath -l:
# /sbin/vsish -e set /vmkModules/iso9660/mount mpx.vmhba0:C0:T0:L0
The CDROM will be mounted under /vmfs/volumes/ [CDROM Label] /
Original Article : VMware Communities 1692327 and http://www.justinedmands.com/?q=node/45