G'Day!
I am exploring areas of using Virtual Machines (VMs) in a chemistry laboratory with instruments (e.g. spectrophotometers) that have USB 2.0 connections. To begin, I converted the existing physical PC attached to the instrument using the VMware Converter tool and created the guest VMs on an ESXi 6 host. I selected two instruments for testing which included a Windows 7 32 bit and a XP SP3 operating system. Both of these systems seem to have converted from a physical PC to a VM without a problem.
After creating the VMs I set up a “generic” Windows 7 SP1 32 bit physical PC with minimal drivers (NIC and video drivers were about it) and no additional antivirus/firewall/etc. software or updates. I then plugged the instrument into the Windows 7 PC and of course there were not any drivers available for the instrument (which I expected).
I opened a RDP session to the appropriate VM and ensured that the port redirection was selected. At this point, neither the XP nor the Windows 7 system was able to “see” the USB redirected instrument. I did this for both the XP and Windows 7 supported instruments.
Not wanting to give up, I installed the vSphere 6 client on the Windows 7 physical PC. I then used the USB redirection from vSphere 6 in an attempt to establish the connection. This method did not work with the XP based instrument but oddly enough I was able to connect to the Windows 7 VM based spectrophotometer and ran some quick tests which were successful.
So, my questions are:
- Why did RDP not redirect the USB based spectrophotometer connections to the VM?
- Why did vSphere USB redirection work with Windows 7 but not XP?
- Do the instrument USB drivers need to be installed on the physical PC for RDP to work and some other configuration need to be accomplished? (Note: I installed the instrument drivers on the Windows 7 physical PC as well but this did not solve the issue.)
I did find the following which may be indicative of the issues:
Any thoughts on why this does not work?
Is there any documentation that I missed?
Any references, particularly from VMware that explains the “why’s” and “why not’s” would be great!
Cheers,
Steve