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DoogsCH
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Windows 7 USB Redirection via RDP to a VMware ESXi Guest

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:

 

  1. Why did RDP not redirect the USB based spectrophotometer connections to the VM?
  2. Why did vSphere USB redirection work with Windows 7 but not XP?
  3. 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

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