My new col­league Olav Tvedt asked me if I could test his method of enabling Bit­locker in a VM, on VMware vSphere. Of course, I was happy to oblige.

I fol­lowed the same steps as he did in his Run­ning Bit­locker on a Vir­tual com­puter post, and it worked perfectly.

The only real dif­fer­ence between doing this in Hyper-V and on ESXi, is that the vir­tual floppy drive on ESXi by default doesn’t emu­late an empty floppy. So, in order to mount a vir­tual floppy you need to cre­ate a new floppy image. Thank­fully the vSphere Client can do this for you!

To use the vSphere Client to cre­ate a floppy image you can later mount in a VM, you need to edit a VM’s set­tings. Find the floppy drive, if the VM doesn’t have one add one, close the win­dow and return to the VM set­tings once the floppy drive has been added, and select “Cre­ate new floppy image in datastore: “.

Click on the Browse but­ton and browse to your pre­ferred loca­tion for the floppy image. Name it, and click on Ok.

Click on Ok again to close the VM set­tings win­dow and return to the vSphere Client.

There you go, an empty vir­tual floppy image that you can mount in a VM is now created.

To mount the image, find the floppy drive icon in the vSphere client and select the Con­nect to floppy image on a data­s­tore option.

Browse to the loca­tion where you cre­ated the floppy image, and select it.

Now, the VM has an empty floppy that you’ll need to for­mat before you can use it.

Fol­low Olav’s guide to encrypt the boot drive with Bit­locker, with­out the need for a TPM chip or USB device con­nected to the VM!

And yes, it works as you can see here:

So much for never need­ing a floppy disk again. Oh, and by the way, you can of course do this is VMware Work­sta­tion 8 as well.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EDB ErgoGroup specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.