For those of you who may have noticed the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the taskbar after upgrading your VMs to virtual hardware version 7, don’t be TOO alarmed. This is caused by the new support for "hot plug" of items like vNICS and SCSI adapters.

While this is fine to leave for most servers, any servers that a user will be accessing the desktop of (XenApp, XenDesktop, VMware View, etc.) will present this icon to the user, who then has the potential to crash the VM (disconnecting a SCSI adapter from a running VM is not a good idea). To disable this, you need to add a row in the VM "Options".

Edit Settings on the VM, and go to the "Options" tab. From there, select "General" in the pane on the left, and select "Configuration Parameters" on the pane on the right. From there, select "Add Row" and enter "devices.hotplug" and provide a VALUE of "false".

Tags: VMware