I am only able to connect USB devices to one host at a time. I thought I could selectively choose which USB device went to each host that has the AnywhereUSB driver and configuration utility installed.
Hello,
The USB ports of an AnywhereUSB cannot be shared amongst computers. One computer can connect to an AnywhereUSB at a time (thus having access to all 5 USB ports).
That isn’t really great news for me.
I am using it with VMWare and don’t want to spend approx $300 for each VM that needs USB access.
Are there any plans for a product that will support VMWare USB devices with individual USB ports at a lesser expense?
Unfortunately, not that I’m aware.
This is a major show stopper for us also as we purchased this for VMWare. We are looking at Silex product SX-2000U2. It allows up to 15 USB devices (via a USB hub) to be shared among 64 users at less than $120. This message will probably get deleted, but Digi needs to know that their device needs to be shared among servers.
Hi,
This message will definitely not be deleted as we appreciate your input and information. I will pass this along to our product manager. Does this product, “Silex product SX-2000U2” work with Vmware?
I do know that down the road we are going to come up with an AnywhereUSB that will allow you to specify an IP address for each individual port but it is way down the road.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Mike Swift
Thank you for your response Mike. I am told that the Silex product will work with VMWare, but we will have to get one in house for testing. Being able to assign an ip address to each port sounds interesting.
Yes, It will be great when it finally happens! I wish it was sooner than later. I would be greatly interested to see if the device you’re going to try works with Vmware. If you would please keep me posted on that. I have forwarded your info to our product manager.
Thanks a lot.
Mike Swift
Just to follow up. I received a demo SX-2000U2 device from Silex yesterday and am testing it today. So far this looks like it is going to work for us. The SX-2000U2 is similar to the Digi USB Anywhere device except the SX-2000U2 only has 1 usb port. You plug in a USB hub of your choice to the SX and you can daisy chain hubs to access up to 15 ports from one SX. The next step is to the load the Silex SX Virtual Link software on the workstation (or server) which is very similar to Digi. The difference here is that on the Digi device you connect one computer to one Digi device. On the Silex SX, you connect a computer to one or more USB ports. So on the SX with 15 ports, I can have computer 1 connected to USB port 1 and 2; computer 2 connected to USB 3, etc. I had the same issue on a Windows VM within VMware ESX with the missing usbd.sys file, but I followed the instructions here and that took care of the problem. The last BIG difference is the price. The msrp of the Silex box is $129 with a street price of just a bit over $100, while the price of the DIGI box if I remember correctly was around $300.