Connect USB device to VMware

[Hakim]

Is there any way to connect a USB device to VMware?

[Official Moderator]

Hi, @Hakim!

Yes, you can connect pretty much any USB device to VMware VMs by using the USB passthrough feature. It is available starting with ESXi 4.1. 

For the USB passthrough functioning, you need 3 main components: the arbitrator, physical USB device and USB controller.

• The arbitrator is an ESXi server service that scans physical USB devices. The arbitrator is enabled on ESXi by default.
• A USB controller has physical USB ports connected. There is also a virtual USB controller created especially for a VM running on a hypervisor. A virtual USB controller interacts with a physical one.
• A physical USB device. Note: Not more than 20 USB devices can be connected to one virtual machine or ESXi host.

You can check all the system requirements and the procedure of connecting a USB device to a virtual machine in our blog post https://www.nakivo.com/blog/how-to-use-usb-devices-with-a-vmware-vsphere-virtual-machine/ 

Let me know if you get any questions along the way.

[Hakim]

@Official Moderator, 

I didn't know about it. Thank you for such a detailed blog post!

[Jameswalter]

Plug the external USB hard drive into the USB port of your physical machine.
Launch VMware Workstation.
Start your virtual machine.
Click VM > Removable device > external_hard_drive_name, then click Connect.

[Official Moderator]

28 minutes ago, Jameswalter said:

Plug the external USB hard drive into the USB port of your physical machine.
Launch VMware Workstation.
Start your virtual machine.
Click VM > Removable device > external_hard_drive_name, then click Connect.

@Jameswalter Thanks for the useful insight.