You can now power on the VM and use the USB device with it! Otherwise the device will only work with USB 2.0 speed: If you want to use a USB 3.0 device at full speed then you need to add a controller of type xHCI. In the hardware properties of the VM add a USB controller. The method to use a host-connected USB device with a VM is called USB passthrough, and the steps to configure it are described in the vSphere docs.

Then it will always be automatically executed at boot time. If you want to make use of your USB 3.0 devices on a regular basis then I recommend adding this command to the file /etc/rc.local.d/local.sh. After that lsusb should also list your USB 3.0 device(s). You will probably not see any USB 3.0 devices then, because the necessary xhci driver module is not loaded automatically (at least not on my whitebox that uses an add-on Renesas chip based controller). Please note: This patch bundle also includes the ESXi 5.5 Update 2 that was released earlier, because ESXi patches are cumulative.Īfter you have booted your newly patched ESXi host you can check with the shell command lsusb what USB devices were detected. If you do not have Internet access with your ESXi host then you need to download the Patch Offline Bundle from MyVMware for Offline patching. # Update using the ESXi 5.5 p03 Imageprofile from the VMware Online depotĮsxcli software profile update -d -p ESXi-5.5.0-20141004001-standard # open firewall for outgoing http requests:Įsxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient using putty) and run the following commands: With an Internet connected standalone ESXi host you can use the well known esxcli method to patch the host directly from the VMware Online Depot:Įnable SSH access on your host, log in to it (e.g. That means with the latest ESXi 5.5 patch you are - for the first time - able to utilize USB Passthrough with USB 3.0 devices!ġ. The related KB2087362 article only includes the standard disclaimer, but no information about what this really means: xHCI stands for Extensible Host Controller Interface, a USB standard that supports USB 3.0 (or SuperSpeed) controllers and devices. When adding the associated Image Profiles to the VibMatrix I noticed that this bundle includes a new package named xhci-xhci.

but there is even more goodness in this patch! And William Lam pointed out that this patch enables support for the Apple Mac Pro 6,1. The October 2014 patch of ESXi 5.5 already got a lot of attention, because it introduced additional Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) management capabilities to prepare for TPS being disabled by default in upcoming ESXi releases.

Vmware intel usb 3.0 host controller