Mounted drives vs. physical drives? Help!

So i've gotten my virtual machine up and running windows 7. I only use this VM to play PC games, but my problem is the DVD Drive (D will not read the discs I physically insert into my machine. Is there a way to make the VM control the physical DVD drive while I am running it, and then switch back when I shut the VM down? Or is there a way to make the VM control the physical drive all the time? Please help!