Cannot activate passthrough for USB device

[TheJuice]

Hi, I have a Huawei 3531 GSM dongle connected to ESXI 7, that is recognized like this :

$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 12d1:1446 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. HSPA modem

But when I try to add the device to a VM, ESXi tells me there is no USB device available to add.

The following command shows me the passthrough is not activated for this device :

$esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list

Bus Dev VendorId ProductId Enabled Can Connect to VM         Name
--- --- -------- --------- ------- ------------------------- ----
1   5   12d1     1446      false   no (passthrough disabled) Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. HSPA modem

I tried to enable the device with this :

esxcli hardware usb passthrough device enable -d 1:5:12d1:1446

and although the command seems to succeed (no error is displayed), the device remains disabled.

Could you help me solve that ?

Thanks. 

[TheJuice · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I was just able to make this work. It was not ESXi related.

On many websites, I saw that the Huawei 3531 was to be put in modem mode with the command AT^SETPORT:A1,A2;1,2,3

As I explained; that did not do the trick. Today; I came across another website that said the command to use was AT^SETPORT="FF;10,12"

With this last command; all was solved and I can now use the GSM stick inside my guest VM in ESXi !

I hope this can be useful to other.

Cheers.

[jorgevaldez101]

Hi dear colleague
Could you tell me where you enabled that command, in which OS and if with any software?

AT^SETPORT="FF;10,12"