It's a pity that VMware ESX server 3.x doesn't support USB bus and so your virtual machines are not able to access the USB devices directly while the VMware Server or VMware Workstation is. However, there are some applications which depend on such devices, for example they require to check a licence file stored in USB token. There are many threads published at VMware communities about it. Let's check a few of them:
So, do we have any way how to solve it? As you can see in the above discussion threads the only possible way is to use specialized hardware which provides USB bus services over TCP/IP stack. Such devices called AnywhereUSB hubs are available at Digi International company site. It is sure that VMware is aware of the problem and provides the same resolution. You can check it at VMware resources page.
The only drawback is that the presented solution is supported on MS Windows platform only. The reason is the AnywhereUSB hub requires device driver which is available for MS Windows only. So the problem is solved by one-half. I would like to know how to achieve this on GNU/Linux ...
2 comments:
Try USB Server for Linux at http://www.incentivespro.com/
It consists of some daemons and some kernel module source you have to compile on your system.
There's also a:
http://usbip.sourceforge.net/
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