I was looking at the behaviour when adding / removing drives on esxi 5.1 platform
Started with Windows 2008
1)Couldn't do a hot add or remove.
Powered off the VM & added a virtual hard disk.
On power on went into console & was able to initialize & format the hard disk as a new partition(H:) using windows mmc.
Question:
why isn't a hot add not supported on windows 2k8 VM? How is this disabled?
I searched for devices.hotplug set to false under General> Configuration Parameters> Add Row. //couldn't find this value added.
Searched for same under vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/vm_name/vm_name.vmx, not present either.
2)Removed the hard disk after a power off from vsphere client -Hardware/Remove option
powered on VM, went into console & to my relief the new H: partion created earlier when i had added the drive was removed (ie all traces of the previous hard disk were removed ) 
I find this different from linux (again custom tweaked
box) where I deleted the vdisk from vsphere client, but logging into linux box, found traces of the device still existed & I can to re-scan + remove them from / tree manually.
Question:
Is this behaviour pretty much operating system dependant?
Any way to accomplish the same for linux?
Thanks
David