I need to know if a USB dongle that is required as a license key for a piece of software will accessible from the physical host machine.
This will be a small vSphere 4 installation targeting the quick backup and system restore capabilities of VMWare, not specifically HA, so I am not to worried about the virtual machine automatically failing over to another physical machine and the dongle not being accessible.
Does ESX have the capability to map a physical USB port or device to a specific Virtual Machine?
I believe this is the dongle: Sentinal Superpro USB Dongle by Rainbow Technologies
Thank you,
Keith
Best Answer
We use a device from AnywhereUSB to attache USB devices (including dongles) inside an ESXi virtual machine.
http://www.digi.com/products/usb/anywhereusb.jsp
The limitations are that when you install Windows in an ESX guest it doesn't install the USB drivers so you have to do it manually. It is a Windows only device.
Also, you can't share one AnywhereUSB device between multiple guests. All ports are attached to one guest.
An additional clarification on the functionality is that you cannot cross LANs with it. It has to be on the same vLAN as your guest.
But, with the those restrictions it has been running fine with no hiccups. We took a physical machine on old hardware with a dongle, ran it through VMware converter, installed the software for the AnywhereUSB (and configured it), then plugged the dongle in and everything works great.