5 USB dongles, one for each VM.
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Browse All TopicsHi, I'm looking for some advice,
I have five Physical Machines which I plan to Virtualize using Citrix Xenserver 5.x, each running XP and each running a Piece of software which requires a single USB hardware dongle in order to run (the dongle must be present at all times, not just to start the software)
As I understand it, the way to go about this is by using a USB to IP solution. I have tried and tested ' USBAnywhere/5 ' from Digi and although this seems to work very well you need one box per VM so I will need another 4 maybe 5 of these boxes and at £224 ($369) each it is not a cost effective solution, I am trying to work with a budget of £2200 ($3618) to buy the required hardware.
Does anybody have any other ideas or have used software which have worked for them?
Many thanks in Advance.
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Have you contacted the software vendor? We were facing a similar issue and they were able to provide us with a dongle-less solution. Other than that, I don't see an option other than something like USBAnywhere. There are a few softwares out there that claim to mount USB drives from your hard drive (like the way Magic ISO mounts and ISO image as a drive), but I don't know how well they work. Your software license may also prohibit this (they may also prohibit a product like USBAnywhere).
Hi,
Many thanks for all your comments and help, but I've found a way around the problem. Its not free, but doesn't eat too much into the budget ($99). This USB to IP network HUB from Belkin is the answer to my prayers!
http://catalog.belkin.com/
It allows you to Connect a virtual machine to a single USB device (in my case a dongle) over the network, unlike USBanywhere/5 it allows multiple connections, so in my case I can plug 5 USB dongles into it and get my 5 Virtual Machines to connect automatically at startup to their respective Dongle. Belkin states with the use of a USB hub, a total of 16 devices can be attached. It also works on Macs, which for me is a bonus.
I've had this running for the last 4 days as a test and appears quite solid. I've had multiple machines connected to multiple USB devices and so far, no dropped connections.
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by: Jacob78Posted on 2009-08-21 at 06:33:07ID: 25151591
So you're trying to run 5 virtual machines from a single USB dongle or 5 USB dongles?