ESXi 5.5 and USB Mouse/Keyboard Problems

[mozzie]

Hi

Please can someone help me with an odd issue that I have with ESXi 5.5 and USB devices.

I have added a 2.0 USB controller to a Guest VM (Windows 8.1), no problem with that.

However, when I plug my mouse and keyboard in to an available USB 2.0 port and choose 'add USB device' in the VM properties, the mouse and keyboard are not listed.

I tried numerous mice but neither show up. So I tried plugging in a USB thumb drive, this shows up no problem.

I want to control a guest VM with a dedicated mouse/keyboard, can this be done? Another thought I had was to passthrough a USB controller and plug the mouse in to this, would this work?

Im tearing my hair out with this.

Cheers

[Linjo]

Keyboard, Mouse and other HID-devices will be filtered out and are not available for passthrough to the VM.

You could try to passthrough the whole USB-controller, there are a few threads on that subject in these forums.

// Linjo

[mozzie]

When you say filtered out, are you implying that it is not possible to assign a USB mouse or keyboard to a Guest VM unless you passthrough a USB controller direct to the Guest VM?

I thought you could assign a secondary mouse/keyboard to a guest VM by uadding a USB device in the Guest settings?

Does this article apply to ESXi? VMware KB: Connecting a second mouse or keyboard directly to a hosted virtual machine

[OscarDavey]

Reboot and then enter your bios go to Advanced section  , make sure EHCI handoffs "Enabled" and reboot .

This should solve your problem

Best regards

Yours, Oscar

[mozzie]

EHCI handoff is enabled. I'm using the Asus P9D-E 4/L motherboard.

I just cannot seem to get ESXi 5.5 to detect a USB mouse.

[cturnbull802]

please help with this. i am having the same issues here with a asrock z87 extreme4 trying to run esxi as a workstation. i have video and sound passed through but cant get the keyboard and mouse to work.

when i try and pass through any of the onboard usb controllers to the VM its giving me a " This device cannot start. (Code 10)"

does anyone know a way to "unfilter" the usb devices, and pass more than flash drives to the vm?

thanks,

-Chris

[jonUF02]

I am having the same problem with my home lab. I have tried everything I can find online and think of. I cannot pass through KB or Mouse connected to the host USB ports. When I go to add devices through the VM settings, it shows no USB devices available, although I have both plugged into the host USB ports. I have successfully passed through a flash drive on one of the host ports. I can pass through the USB 3.0 controller (pci device) from the motherboard, but I get the Code 10 driver errors in my Guest machine, even after installing the proper driver from the original disk. The DVD drive and PCI video card are passed through successfully. I am booting ESXi 5.5 from USB, and the USB KB works on the yellow/black screen just fine. Guest is Windows 7 Pro x64. Motherboard is Gigabyte 970A-UD3P. I'm wondering if this is just an issue of ESXi not having the drivers to support the physical USB ports? I also get errors when trying to pass through any USB (storage) devices from the vSphere Client window. It sees the storage devices, and tries to connect, then stops with error.

Any help would be appreciated. My goal is to have the video passed through (done!) with a local KB and Mouse, then use the VM as a work station while running other VMs in the background.

[mozzie]

I ended up buying a startech USB 3.0 2-port adapter PCI-e x1. http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/USB-3.0/Cards/~PEXUSB3S25

This passes through without issue. I have my logitech keyboard and mouse connected to this card with a USB 3.0 hub, everything works fine.

[jonUF02]

Sounds good, that was going to be my next step; ditch the onboard USB 3.0 and go for the PCI card. I need to find one that I can plug in the front panel cable to the board, everything should work out then. I was just trying to work without spending any more, but those cards don't cost too much.

[BreathOfIT]

I need a way to do this with software... I am all out of PCIe ports. In previous versions I was able to attach a USB hub and then connect w/e I needed to the hub. Now even the hub is being filtered out. There must be a way to un "filter" the devices.

[Geoff64]

Wow, this really baffles me.  You can't assign a simple USB HID device to a guest VM?  I was planning on using ESXi to virtualize some HTPCs, and I was thinking the GPU pass through was going to be the hard part.  But something as simple as USB keyboard assignment?

This made me rethink my entire approach.  I installed CentOS on the box, picked "Virtual Host" as the option, imported a VM and assigned a USB keyboard from virt-manager no problem.  In fact, the entire process went so smoothly (in about 2 hours), that now I'm almost glad ESXi had this issue.  With CentOS/virt-manager I can now mirror my VM storage (did that on the CentOS install), and even pass through my striped array to a "filer" VM (instead of messing with SATA passthrough).  I benchmarked virtio on 2 striped seagate 3TB drives and got this:

  Host:  benchmark: avg read: 317 MB/s  avg write: 230 MB/s  avg access: 16.8ms
  Guest: benchmark: avg read: 315 MB/s  avg write: 219 MB/s  avg access: 16.8ms

I'm still puzzled how ESXi can't do this....

[cdoublejj]

Share USB port over IP - YouTube

this might be helpful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzDVPEXBzfU

Grave digging because this is the first result on Google.