Have you ever noticed when you create a new VM, a floppy device is present in the GuestOS regardless if you had actually added one or not? If not, it is pretty simple to demonstrate. Create any Windows VM using a non-vSphere 6.5 release, install the OS and then power it on. You should now see a floppy device (A:) show up under "My Computer" as seen in the screenshot below.
Although this may look like a strange behavior (more on this in a bit), it is completely harmless as there is no real floppy device being presented to the VM. For many customers, this behavior was either unnoticed or it was just ignored as it did not bother them. However, there is a concern for some customers who must prove that the virtual hardware seen from the GuestOS matches the virtual hardware presented to the VM, usually for compliance purposes. To prevent a floppy device from showing up, you can edit the BIOS, but this generally does not scale as it must be done manually (no APIs exists) and even some of the BIOS editing utilities are fairly limited in their capabilities.
So why does this happen and how does vSphere 6.5 help?
In talking to one of our Principal Engineers about this topic, as this question comes up from time to time about disabling floppy devices in the BIOS. I came to learn more about the behavior described above and the nice enhancement that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 for Virtual Hardware Plug-N-Play.
