You can use the bigv command line to insert a CD or DVD into your virtual machine's virtual disc drive. This will allow you to install an OS from scratch, or access data from a local device. You can use a disc that's in your PC, or use a copy of one over the internet. Either way the media will appear as if you've inserted it into your virtual machine.

Using a local disc

Assuming you have a CD or DVD you want to insert into the VM called 'matt1', and it's in your computer's drive, type:

$ bigv vm insertcd matt1 /dev/cdrom
Serving /dev/cdrom to the virtual machine matt1 at 213.138.98.34.
Press Enter to quit

The CD-ROM will stay connected to your virtual machine until you use the vm removecd command or press enter. If you physically eject the CD from the drive, it will likely have the same effect, but you may find that your computer doesn't let you remove the disc until you've typed the command first!

The CD-ROM will be served to your virtual machine over your current internet connection. If you're running over a consumer broadband link, you may find this quite slow, but it's usually tolerable for one-off jobs, and depends how much of the CD-ROM you need to access.

You can also use a copy of a local disc instead, e.g.

$ bigv vm insertcd matt1 Downloads/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-amd64.iso

Using a CD or DVD over the internet

You can usually get faster speeds by using a disc image directly from Bytemark's mirror service, though you can use any URL you want.

This example shows us inserting a Debian boot CD:

$ bigv vm insertcd matt1 http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian/dists/squeeze/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso
http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/debian/dists/squeeze/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso successfully mounted.

If you use your own web server, you must make sure it stays up while the CD-ROM is connected, otherwise your VM will see "read errors" as it would for a scratched disc.

As before you can use the vm removecd command to eject the CD.