On Mar 6, 2010, at 6:44 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > I know they have USB pass-through on many other virtualization products … > They don’t do this on ESXi? > I’ve done it on VMWare Workstation, Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox … but I > guess these are all desktop products, and I never tried it on ESXi or > XenServer.
The desktop products you list all have the benefit of an underlying OS with its own USB support layer. ESXi runs on bare metal, and generally does not support USB passthrough. The exception would be ESXi 4.0 (vSphere) running on the newest Nehalem hardware with VT-d support. But realize that there's not a huge amount of demand for something like USB passthrough in a multi-server virtualized environment, because plugging something unique into a single physical host suddenly makes all the fail-over and redundancy built into the cluster useless for any VMs which require it. The approach of a network-connected USB hub is far preferable, and it looks like that's the direction Jefferson is heading. -- Joshua Penix http://www.binarytribe.com Binary Tribe Linux Integration Services & Network Consulting _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
