6.5 ESXI and USB printer

[adriankoooo]

I am trying to make work a Zebra USB printer on my ESXI 6.5 host. I added a USB 2.0 controller to my guest machine (tried Windows 7 and Debian 10, Ubuntu) then I added my Zebra printer as USB device. All my guest machines are recognising the printer (lsusb on guest shows it, Windows recognises the printer), but after setting up drivers in Windows or CUPS in Linux I am unable to print any data to the printer. I am pretty sure it is a problem with ESXI configuration. The printer prints perfectly fine on any other non ESXI device.

I tried to disable vmkusb based on this: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/ESXi-Discussions/esxi-6-5-usb-printer-partial-printing-on-guest-VM...

...but I don't know if it's actually become disabled. How can I check it?

[adriankoooo]

Edit, vmkusb is disabled:

[root@esxi:~] esxcli system module list | grep vmkusb
vmkusb false false

...but enabled or disabled, doesn't help.

[adriankoooo]

Here is my vmware.log (renamed to csv, only this is allowed) with enabled option usb.analyzer.enable.

[l3gsh0t]

Ever make any progress on this? I have a similar issue with a Brother label printer. Lsusb shows the printer, the software on the VM can modify the settings (I see lights changing when settings are changed), the drivers show up from device as mass storage, but cannot print from VM environment.

[Loranet]

I had a similar issue, from memory I had to turn off the USB arbitration but I'm not 100% certain on that

I'll have a look at my configuration in the next day or two and report back