Remote USB for virtual machines

Virtualization of servers results in the fact that server are no longer depeded on the hardware on which it runs. This is one of the key selling points of virtualization, but it also results in the fact that you can’t connect external hardware devices to your virtual machine directly. 

Especially for USB devices this can be a problem. There are still application vendors out there that have implemented some sort of USB dongle for licensing their software. To make it possible to connect your USB dongle to a virtual machines an implementation is needed of remote USB to connect the USB devices to your virtual machine.

The following picture gives a graphical representation of how this works.  

Click to enlarge

The concept of remote USB is based on the client-server model. All USB devices will be centralized to one USB remote server. Through a software USB device driver (=client) in the virtual machine a connection is made with this USB remote server.

Through management on the USB remote server, USB devices can be allocated to a particular virtual machine. This allows virtual machines to make use of USB devices without connecting that USB device to the hardware on which it runs. All USB data is now send over the network from the virtual machine to the remote USB server and vice versa.

There are several vendors on the market with a remote USB solution. All have the same result : giving access to USB devices over the network. Only difference is that some have software based solution while others have a hardware based solution.

When using a software based solution a server is needed that acts as the remote USB host. The server must have enough USB slots available to connect all the USB devices. The hardware based solution is a network device which act as the end point in the remote USB solution. All USB devices will be connected to this network device.

Examples :

Note : Remote USB isn’t needed for VDI implementations. Most VDI vendors have USB redirection incorporated into their solution. In case you are using thin clients, USB redirection can also be implemented on the thin client policy server.

Advancing The Foundation For Cloud Computing

VMware released the long awaited vSphere 4.1. This update of the current vSphere productline has some great new feature included in this release. The notes on “What’s new” can be found here.

Some new features include :

Network I/O Control. Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic (vNetwork Distributed Switch only).

Memory Compression. Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk.

Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion.

Network I/O Control. Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic (vNetwork Distributed Switch only).

ESX/ESXi Active Directory Integration. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory allows seamless user authentication for ESX/ESXi. You can maintain users and groups in Active Directory for centralized user management and you can assign privileges to users or groups on ESX/ESXi hosts. In vSphere 4.1, integration with Active Directory allows you to roll out permission rules to hosts by using Host Profiles.

Also a nice note is included under Install and Deployment : “Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture.” This means that we won’t see ESX anymore in the future releases. The result will be that you eventually will need to upgrade to ESXi. Not a bad thing as I already explained in an earlier post here. For more information on how to migrate to ESXi, look at this whitepaper written by VMware.

You can download the new release here. Next thing : update to new release and play with new features 😉

UPDATE : For more information on the vSphere 4.1 go to this link page of Eric Siebert. Excellent resource for all the vSphere 4.1 information out there.