20 Jul
2010
20 Jul
'10
9:36 a.m.
On 7/20/10, Ray Arachelian <ray at arachelian.com> wrote:
On 07/20/2010 11:52 AM, John Foust wrote:
> Another stunner was that vmWare didn't support native USB on the host.
> They're accomplishing thousands of other miracles, but can't virtualize
> USB enough for me to connect a drive to a virtual appliance?
Yes. That's been a deficiency for some time.
> (I think this is fixed in last month's major
release.)
I've heard it works with ESX(i) 4.1. Unfortunately, we are using ESXi
3.5, ESXi 4.0, and ESX 4.0. :-(
Works beautifully under VMWare Fusion. And when I did
have to use
windows, it worked nicely under VMWare server... I've not tried it under
VMWare Workstation, but I suspect it would work just the same.
Probably, but in the enterprise world I work in, we moved away from
the host-OS-based VM platforms (Server/Workstation) over a year ago,
and except for losing our ability to plug in USB drives full of
off-site backups, the change was a big win. We went from a Dell box
that crashed and locked up every two weeks while running VMware Server
2 over Win2K8 to 10 months (and counting!) of continuous server uptime
with ESXi 4.0 on the *same hardware*.
Yeah, the lack of serial ports on modern machines is
annoying. There
are plenty of USB to serial cables out there, but not all of them work
well, and the device moves around, making it annoying to find. Is it
com3? com2? com37? :-)
That's another annoyance - plus if you plug in two USB serial dongles
from the same vendor, it's not exactly easy for the
application to
guess which device you were talking to the last time you ran.
Considering there's a real-world device on the far end, consistency
kinda matters.
-ethan