Mar 21, 2016 - I am using VMware Fusion 8 on El Cap for Win7 and USB works fine. The same guest had no issues on Fusion 5 and Mavericks or Fusion 7 and Yosemite. Both claim to support USB 3 on Windows 7 with a 3rd party download. The workaround was to eject the USB host controller in Win 7 and then. Additionally, VMware Workstation does not support USB3.0 natively and you need extra drivers in the guest for the USB device. I highly recommend to use USB 2.0 for your virtual machine. Go to the Virtual Machine Settings and Make sure the USB Controller is present in the device list and USB compatibility is set to USB2.0. I'm upgrading my in-house server to a new box and wanted to do it under a hypervisor so I could run multiple servers and get my feet wet with virtualization. One of my primary uses for my server is to directly connected customer hard drives and do speedy full image and full robocopy backups. Was looking forward to doing it under USB 3.0 on my new box after being stuck at USB 2.0 speeds for a long time. I'm finding with my initial setup that there's quite a performance hit going virtual. Looks like bare metal OS installs are 2.7 to 4.5 times faster at transferring data over USB than using ESXi as a hypervisor. Speed tests for copying a 21GB file: USB 2.0: HP MicroServer Windows Home Server 2011, bare metal: 28 MB/sec Lenovo TS440 WHS 2011 under ESXi 6.0, 6.2 MB/sec USB 3.0: Lenovo TS440 Windows Server 2012 Essentials R2 under ESXi 6.0, USB3, 41 MB/sec Desktop PC with Intel Core i7 and SSD Windows 7, USB3, 110 MB/sec Now, I understand that direct attached-USB devices were probably not part of the design goals of a hypervisor like VMware ESXi. But are my findings accurate? Is there a way to get near bare-metal performance in this setup? George harrison singles discography. Would it work better under a Microsoft Hyper-V setup? Hey Rick, VMware has always had issues with USB (hell it didnt even support it for years). With that, I have run into the same issues with trying to use a fast external USB3 Drive to offload data. If you can afford a $30-$40 USB 3 card, here is how to take advantage of USB3 in a virtual machine. Please keep in mind that doing this locks the USB card into the one VM, but it does work and its fast. Put a USB3 Card in the server 2. Set the device up on the VM for 'Passthrough' Here is a link to an article with step by step instructions on doing this. (I didnt write the article, but didnt want to re-write it) Doing this works great. We use this technique and you get back all the speed, unfortunately you have to lock the card to that one specific VM. Link -- Hope this helps . John White wrote: infotime wrote: One of my primary uses for my server is to directly connected customer hard drives and do speedy full image and full robocopy backups. Was looking forward to doing it under USB 3.0 on my new box after being stuck at USB 2.0 speeds for a long time. So the customers send you the physical drive, you image it, and send it back? I bring the system in because it's screwed up. Malware, Windows boot problems, etc. It's in preparation for a wipe and reinstall. I back up the entire thing twice. Did some more testing on the speed tonight. Installed Windows Server 2012 R2 bare metal. ![]() No VMware or other hypervisor or virtualization. 156 MB / sec coming from USB 3.0 drive to C: drive of server. 131 MB / sec using the robocopy script used in the other tests, sending the file from the C: drive to the USB drive. Remember, the best I could do was about 40 MB / sec on the VMware setup. Quite a performance hit, don't ya think? Hey Rick, VMware has always had issues with USB (hell it didnt even support it for years). With that, I have run into the same issues with trying to use a fast external USB3 Drive to offload data. If you can afford a $30-$40 USB 3 card, here is how to take advantage of USB3 in a virtual machine. Please keep in mind that doing this locks the USB card into the one VM, but it does work and its fast. Put a USB3 Card in the server 2. Set the device up on the VM for 'Passthrough' Here is a link to an article with step by step instructions on doing this. (I didnt write the article, but didnt want to re-write it) Doing this works great. We use this technique and you get back all the speed, unfortunately you have to lock the card to that one specific VM. Link -- Hope this helps . Since it seems like there are two controllers on this machine, and most PCs I've dealt with, one for USB 2.0 and a separate controller for USB 3.0 I think I might have a shot at passing through just the USB 3.0. That would be fine for my setup. I don't mind buying a card, but this would be quicker and easier. Here's a screenshot of the Device Manager under Windows Server 2012 running bare metal on this machine: I'm going to try booting the machine with ESXi and seeing if I can pass through the 'Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 0100 (Microsoft)'. Doesn't look like I can assign the on-board ports in this way. In the 'DirectPath I/O Configuration' screen I get a message that 'Host does not support passthrough configuration'.
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