Hello and welcome to another article on VMware. This time, we’ll talk about a simple task – connecting a USB device to a virtual machine in VMware.
This article is aimed at a novice audience in the virtualization world, and I hope it adds a little more knowledge here and there.
So let’s get started.
Connect the USB device to the VM
First of all, let’s connect to our vSphere console and select the virtual machine to which we want to add the USB device. Please note that the USB device must be physically connected during the configuration change.
After selecting the virtual machine to which we want to add the USB device, we right-click on it and go to “Change settings”.
On the settings page, click “Add”.
Now, the first thing we need to do is add a USB controller, which will allow us to connect the USB device. So let’s choose the USB controller from the device menu.
Enable EHCI and UHCI to ensure full compatibility with all USB devices, including USB 3.0 devices.
On the summary page, click Finish.
We are now ready to add your USB device and start having fun.
Back in the Settings and Add pages, the USB device that was greyed out before adding the USB controller is now ready to be added.
On the next page, we will find out which USB devices are physically connected to the ESXi host. In my case it is a MultiTech USB modem used for a fax server.
The “Maintain vMotion when device is connected” checkbox is cleared because we do not want the virtual machine to move around our vSphere cluster and lose the ability to connect to the USB device.
Well that’s all. Simple, easy, effective.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article, and I hope it helps you.