derickso's Posts

Yeah my VM connects directly to our TV and I have a dedicated USB controller passed through to windows that I plug a wireless keyboard/trackpad into. I also do disable the ESXi Vga card. I haven't had an issue with reverting back, anytime I unplug my monitor from the physical video card it turns the other one back on and I can get to it via the esxi console.

Thanks for the indepth response! Weird that onboard USB3 works but not 2, I wonder if there is some way to figure out what ESX 5.5 is doing differently via running lspci within the VM on each ESXi version.

Got it, thanks Jon. As another anecdotal performance piece, I was doing pass through of some USB 2.0 enclosed HDs and found I could only get ~7MB/s of transfer rate through them when passed through via ESXi 5, when I passed through the USB controller itself I could max out the USB 2.0 link at ~35MB/s.

Jon: Just to be clear, you passed through the USB controller to the VM, but within the VM the OS didn't see the controller? Or the devices plugged into the controller did not work? Did it work after the first reboot, but not subsequent ones? Thanks, David

5.5 is now GA and downloadable here: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=ESXI550&productId=352&rPId=4260 Anyone try it yet to find out if motherboard USB pass through works and remains working through reboots of the server?

derickso wrote: So my setup has been running pretty well for around the last year, but I have a few remaining gripes that I wanted to check and see if anyone else is experiencing, and has resolved. 1) VM crashes when watching video using Silverlight (ie Netflix) My VM will randomly have its video lock up and become unresponsive when watching Netflix in a Windows 7 VM using the MCE interface, but I've verified it happens in Firefox as well.  Latest Silverlight revision.  I tried newer ATI drivers, no luck, and in fact made it worse so I reverted.  Sometimes it will run fine for a long time, other times it will crash 10 minutes apart.  Very frustrating, I've considered creating a script to detect when tools is nolonger responsive and reboot the VM, but of course I'd rather fix this if possible.  Also, it never locks up when playing regular MCE recorded video from my TV tuners. 2) Strange wireless keyboard/mouse behavior I'm using a Logitech DiNovo keyboard with integrated touchpad, with the receiver connected to a passed through USB hub to the VM mentioned above.  I occasionally experience strange latency to commands, and actual full dropouts.  Its possible this is the result of some kind of interference at my house, but I thought I'd check since it was quite weird, and sporadic. Thanks! David As a follow up to this: 1) It turned out this was because I had not set the pciHole config params.  This VM was using only 2GB of RAM so I thought it unnecessary, but apparently it isn't.  So make sure you set this no matter what.  My VM hasn't crashed once since I set this. 2) Haven't resolved this yet, I'm going to get a USB extender and try to move the wireless receiver to the front for an unobscured line of sight, hopefully it is a simple problem like that. -David