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Comment by klinquist | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps only barely fitting the definition, my most used application is ESXi on a intel Mac Mini which runs VMs for Ubuntu & Windows.

I lost the ability to use Windows software that interfaced with devices over USB when I got my M1 MBP - or so I thought - until I learned that you can share USB devices over the network to a VM running on ESXi.

So now I have my windows ham radio programming software (uses a USB-Serial interface), my Toyota diagnostic software (uses a specialized USB-OBD2 cable) running on a VM. I can VPN into my home network and attach the devices connected to my M1 Mac to the Windows VM from anywhere.

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Can you flesh out the whole “share usb devices over the network”? What are you using to do that? Thanks!

Not the OP, but it's a feature of the vSphere client ("Client Connected"). https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1022290

For what it's worth, you could also use USB over IP (http://usbip.sourceforge.net/) even if your virrualisation host doesn't support it. Watch out for authentication though, because the protocol doesn't care a whole lot about security. Might be worth the effort of setting up a wireguard/ipsec tunnel to secure the traffic.

It's been awhile since I used ESXi but for awhile I was running an ESXi6 server and I'd connect to a VM on the server from my linux desktop with VMware Player (I believe you officially needed workstation to do this but there was a command line backdoor). Then in the client there was a redirect USB device option.

I do the same thing now with qemu/kvm server. I just fire up virt-manager, open the VM I want to use and pick redirect USB device from the menu. Then I can select a local USB device and send it through. I haven't used it for much besides flash drives though. It requires a couple tweaks to the VM settings and I think it needs spice tools but that's expected, VMware needed VMware tools for this as well.

Just running VMWare Fusion Pro on my M1 MBP. Choose connect to server -> enter IP address /login/password for your ESXi host. Launch virtual machine. Then you can simply tell Fusion to connect any USB devices to the remote VM, the same way you would if it were a local VM.

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