asked on

VMWare 6.5 - not seeing USB devices

Hello VMWare experts,

I'm running VMWare 6.5 - not seeing USB devices

When I boot up, here's vmkernel.log:
2019-10-28T19:34:25.835Z cpu5:66131)ScsiDeviceIO: 2948: Cmd(0x439500ace880) 0x1a, CmdSN 0x49d from world 0 to dev "naa.600605b00c3c7b30205c0aa430c242bf" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0.
2019-10-28T19:34:26.115Z cpu8:67600)CpuSched: 692: user latency of 67622 J6AsyncReplayManager 0 changed by 67600 hostd-worker -1
2019-10-28T19:34:26.593Z cpu15:67647)Boot Successful
2019-10-28T19:34:26.866Z cpu7:67658)Starting up rc scripts
2019-10-28T19:34:26.967Z cpu8:67617)TPM FixedMem: start = 0xfed40000, end = 0xfed40fff, write protect = 0
2019-10-28T19:34:27.492Z cpu4:67698)WARNING: kbdmode_set:440: invalid keyboard mode 4: Not supported
2019-10-28T19:34:40.060Z cpu6:67617)CpuSched: 692: user latency of 67853 J6AsyncReplayManager 0 changed by 67617 hostd-worker -1
2019-10-28T19:36:23.070Z cpu8:66131)ScsiDeviceIO: 2948: Cmd(0x439500bc7e80) 0x1a, CmdSN 0x2 from world 67497 to dev "naa.600605b00c3c7b30205c0aa430c242bf" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0.
2019-10-28T19:37:47.324Z cpu0:65666)WARNING: Heartbeat: 498: One or more PCPUs didn't perform a heartbeat check for 9 seconds.

Here's boot up USB.log:
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: USBArbRuleStore: Error in '/etc/vmware/usbarb.rules' at line 1:0, '[' or '{' expected near end of file.
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: VMware USB Arbitration Service Version 15.1.11
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: USBArb: Attempting to connect to existing arbitrator on /var/run/vmware/usbarbitrator-socket.
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: SOCKET creating new socket, connecting to /var/run/vmware/usbarbitrator-socket
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: SOCKET connect failed, error 2: No such file or directory
2019-10-28T19:34:17Z usbarb[66702]: USBArb: Failed to connect to the existing arbitrator.
2019-10-28T19:34:25Z usbarb[66702]: USBArb: UsbArbPipeConnected: Connected to client, socket:12
2019-10-28T19:34:25Z usbarb[66702]: USBArb: Client 66847 connected (version: 7)

The usbarb.rules file is empty. Should it be?

Independent of passthrough compatibility, when I plug a working USB external hard drive in, I don't see any messages at all about the device connecting to the host. There are no new messages that I can tell in these two log files relating to the USB device being plugged in. The virtual machine is off while these logs were gathered.

Thanks. Stephen

Stephen Yeoh

ASKER

Here's the output from lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0e0f:8003 VMware, Inc.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

oh my favourite EE question...

Is your USB device on the USB HCL ?

Now just because VMware supports feature called USB passthrough, does not mean that ALL USB devices are supported for passthrough, it was designed only for Security Tokens (Dongles), and I wish VMware would state that.....

Please read this Article I wrote and all the comments, and also this group post I wrote about USB passthrough....

HOW TO: Add and Connect a USB Device to a Virtual Machine, hosted on VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESX 4.1 ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0

https://www.experts-exchange.com/discussions/209901/VMware-Support-Test-for-USB-Passthrough-issue.html

(oh and it's been the same for 4.x, 5.x, 6.x)

Member_2_231077

Surely it should see USB sticks though, after all it can boot from USB. They're not trying passthrough to a VM.

Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

and then VMware has some crap which excludes them!

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