I was recently speaking with someone about power management in a home lab environment. Their plan was to use USB passthrough to connect a UPS to a virtual machine in a vSphere cluster. From there, they could use PowerCLI scripting to gracefully power off the environment if the UPS battery got too low. This sounded like a wise plan.
Their concern was that the VM would need to be pinned to the host where the USB cable was connected and that vMotion would not be possible. To their pleasant surprise, I told them that support for vMotion of VMs with USB passthrough had been added at some point in the past and it was no longer a limitation.
When I started looking more into this feature, however, I discovered that this was not a new addition at all. In fact, this has been supported ever since USB passthrough was introduced in vSphere 4 over seven years ago. Have a look at the vSphere Administration Guide for vSphere 4 on page 105 for more information.
I had done some work with remote serial devices in the past, but I’ve never been in a situation where I needed to vMotion a VM with a USB device attached. It’s time to finally take this functionality for a test drive.
vswitchzero 