Add USB Device grayed out in ESXi 6.7

[bgwallace]

Team,

Any idea why "Add USB Device" would be grayed out in the VM's configuration within the ESXi Embedded Host Client?  I've tried multiple operating systems, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 controllers, etc. but for some reason my WD Pa$$port USB HD device never shows up in the client.  I've also tried other basic USB devices.  Are there any troubleshooting steps I can take to see where the issue is?

Thanks,

Brad

[bgwallace · Accepted solution]

I SSH'd to the ESXi server and ran the following command which showed that the USB device was connected but also showed that the usbarbitrator service wasn't running.

esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list

I forgot that I was forced to disable this service when I first setup the server in order for ESXi to recognize an attached USB Hard Drive as a Datastore.  I re-enabled the service to run temporarily by using the command below.

/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator start

[SyApps]

This was the answer for us. Thanks for letting us know what you did! For the record, we were using 6.7 U2 and the USB arbitrator service was not started by default or something stopped it; we did not stop it manually. Once it was started, we restarted the management service, powered off and on the VM and we could then add USB.

[MaxFry]

Could be due to vmkusb disabled

#Check
[root@ESX-i:~] esxcfg-module -l
vmkusb Not Loaded

#Enable
esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=TRUE

Reboot. Ready.

[RMwesigye]

I had exactly the same issue. After trying these steps i just reconnected the USB drive and I was able to add it to the my VM as a usb passthrough