Attaching a physical USB to Windows guest VM for file backups??

[tlyczko]

We want to do files backups -- certain files only, not a whole server.

I've been working with a USB device with RDX removable disks -- with the USB attached to a NAS.

The NAS keeps thinking each removable disk is a new disk and this makes it difficult to create backup jobs etc.

I know a guest VM can have a USB port -- is this tied to the USB port on the host??
Is it a lot slower?? Are there any risks involved etc.?? (other than normal precautions)

Guest VM is Windows 2008 R2 SP1, backup software is SyncBack Pro 6.x, USB is an Imation RDX disk enclosure.

Thank you, Tom

[Nikhil_Patwa]

With ESXi version 4.1 there is USB support added and now you can plug in a USB device on the host that gets detected in the guest VM but the USB device will only get detected on a single VM i.e. same USB on the host will not be detected on multiple VMs at the same time.

View the link below for more information.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=102229...

We have been taking data backups from the VM using external USB drives attached to the host and detected to the VM - the performance is pretty fast and we also keep on changing our backup USB drives.

Hope this information is useful

Nikhil

[J1mbo]

In my testing performance was very limited, this was 4.1 (no updates) though:

http://blog.peacon.co.uk/usb-passthrough-with-esxi-4-1/

I wrote, "The performance is an area of disappointment – in testing I found that USB Flash drives seemed to run at about 3 MB/s, and spinning storage a little better at about 4 MB/s.  The convenience of USB pass-through is without question, but it is clearly not going to be suitable as a method to provide (for example) a backup device to a guest periodically."