RabbieBurns Posted March 30, 2010 Posted March 30, 2010 Just been told hyperV cannot connect to host USB devices?? Is this true?? Virtualbox has been doing it for years! I need to connect my virtual nagios box to a USB cable so I can hook it up to a cellphone for SMS.
danrhodes Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 Unfortuantly Hyper-V does not support Native USB Passthrough. You may find this usefull virtualboy blog : Hyper-V and USB...
FN-GM Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 Microsoft purposely pulled this out. At a Microsoft event i asked why, they didnt explain why just that it wasn't even on the cards to go back in.
sted Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 just use rdp and connect usb devices that way rather than through hyperv console
RabbieBurns Posted March 31, 2010 Author Posted March 31, 2010 just use rdp and connect usb devices that way rather than through hyperv console But the USB device needs to be permanenlty connected.. Ill look into one of the usb -> ethernet things.. Or I might just move it to a Virtualbox Host instead.
danrhodes Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 But the USB device needs to be permanenlty connected.. Ill look into one of the usb -> ethernet things.. Or I might just move it to a Virtualbox Host instead. Just move to the proper VM soultion VMware Virtualization Software for Desktops, Servers & Virtual Machines for a Private Cloud
RabbieBurns Posted March 31, 2010 Author Posted March 31, 2010 define 'proper' ? ESX and Xen dont do USB Passthrough either from what Ive read today.. How is VMWare desktop/workstation any better than Virtualbox?
danrhodes Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 I suppose VirtualBox is very similar, I have a preference for VMWare as it's one of the solutions I'm trained in. Having never used VirtualBox before I can't really comment. As long as it works, then it's ok, does VirtualBox support USB? D
DMcCoy Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 Enterprise stuff is *less* likely to support passthrough due to the higher probability of migrating machines. I believe ESX supports only serial and ESXi doesn't even do that.
SYNACK Posted March 31, 2010 Posted March 31, 2010 Yeap, Hyper-V does not support parallel either which means I have to run our dodgy Avaya rubbish on a VMWare Server install (thanks to the dongle). If Virtualbox offered the ability to run VMs as a background service I would use it instead as I have found it faster and much lighter weight.
RabbieBurns Posted March 31, 2010 Author Posted March 31, 2010 Yeap, Hyper-V does not support parallel either which means I have to run our dodgy Avaya rubbish on a VMWare Server install (thanks to the dongle). If Virtualbox offered the ability to run VMs as a background service I would use it instead as I have found it faster and much lighter weight. Virtualbox supports 'headless' mode (in linux at least, i assume it does in windows too) whereby it just launches a process and an rdp server, and to connect to it you just RDP to it. @danrhodes: Yep, virtualbox does usb passthrough, but its free. AFAIK you need to pay for VMWare Workstation? @DMcCoy: I can see the thought behind high availability / auto migration of VMs messing up a USB passthrough, but surely it should at least be an option?
Arthur Posted April 1, 2010 Posted April 1, 2010 Microsoft purposely pulled this out. At a Microsoft event i asked why, they didnt explain why just that it wasn't even on the cards to go back in. VMware recommend you disable unused USB and CD-ROM devices because they consume CPU resources even when idle. Perhaps Microsoft was thinking along those lines? Source: http://goo.gl/ZU6P (Page 16)
djones Posted April 2, 2010 Posted April 2, 2010 So does that mean if I use Hyper-V Server running virtual 2008 R2 servers and want to use removable USB HDDs to create and store backups from within the 2008 guests, I can't?
localzuk Posted April 2, 2010 Posted April 2, 2010 So does that mean if I use Hyper-V Server running virtual 2008 R2 servers and want to use removable USB HDDs to create and store backups from within the 2008 guests, I can't? Yes. Your options are: Plug the devices into another server and host them as network shares, putting files on that way Getting an ethernet -> USB host such as Sharkoon USB LANPort 400 - Aria Technology Using a different VM system such as Virtualbox or VMWare Server.
Kitkatninja Posted April 2, 2010 Posted April 2, 2010 You can use a USB drive in Hyper-V, however it's not as easy as in (say) their competitor VMWare: You can "pass-through" the external USB drive to a virtual machine by setting it to Offline in disk management on the host. After you've done that, you can set it as a local HDD in the virtual machine settings. -Ken
localzuk Posted April 2, 2010 Posted April 2, 2010 The problem is, virtual machines are designed to be hardware independent - tying a VM to a machine specific USB device defeats that purpose and reduces transferability of the VM should it need moving. Having an external USB host would be a better bet, as it doesn't matter which VM hosting box the guest VM is on then - the USB host still stays on its own IP.
Arthur Posted April 2, 2010 Posted April 2, 2010 As mentioned above, USB over network software would seem the best solution. This video shows one in action on Hyper-V. http://virtualboytv.com/r2hyperv7.aspx
Arthur Posted April 11, 2010 Posted April 11, 2010 ESX and Xen dont do USB Passthrough either from what I've read today.. Citrix released Xen 4.0 last week, so it does now (along with VGA pass-through to HVM guests). http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/Xen4.0 http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenUSBPassthrough
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