USB Passthrough Speed

[billu]

I haven't upgraded any of my ESX 4.x installation to 5 yet, but am curious about USB pass-thru speeds.

In 4.x, attaching an external USB drive directly to an ESX server and writing to that drive from a virtual server is pretty bad in the performance department.  For those instances, we have actually been purchasing usb-to-ethernet adapters for the drives.

I am curious if the speed is any better with 5?

tia,

Bill

[SixShooterz]

The speeds using the USB controller for Windows are horrendously slow.  Using Ubuntu Linux and the xHCI controller, I achieve USB 2.0 speeds. I'm still on the search for a Linux distro that will let me fully utilize my USB 3.0 drive that's being passed thru..

[jyarborough]

Do you have any further information about configuring the xHCI controller Ubuntu or is it a default (sorry, not much of a Linux guy anymore)?  I'm trying to figure out a good way to attach an RDX drive to an ESXi host and if I can present it through Ubuntu and share it out with Samba or something I would fine with that.  Windows is way to slow and all the USB to ethernet devices I have found are either USB 1.1 or have horribly written software that doesn't run as a service.

[AndreTheGiant]

I've make some test (without a simple USB2 controller) and seems quite good.

Enough to use external USB HD and near to native USB2 speed.

[billu]

For what's it's worth, I just had a chance to test USB Passthrough speeds in ESXi 5.  They still suck.  <sigh>

I copied 1900+ files totalling about 2GB to a USB 2.0 drive physically attached to my ESXi 5 box.  The guest host is Win2k8 and it was configured with USB passthrough.  I averaged about 5MBs, which is just barely better than USB 1.1 speeds.  So apparently... no difference.

Bill

[DoDo201110141]

Ive noted high System cpu usage during USB transfer (to an RDX)

I think that even if I got this RDX to work within the guest, I would then quickly realise that I could ony use it from within that one guest... and then I would have to wonder why I am even using ESXi, if I only have one machine to backup....

[DoDo201110141]

My tip: Install ubuntu and use Virtual Box or VMWare server.

That way, you can automate the snapshoting of machines, back them up, and delete the snapshot.

No need for GhettoVCB. No need for network storage.

And full USB 3.0 speed.