External USB3 missing under VMware ESXi 6.5

[ThomasD1]

Hello,

we have the problem with a customers ESXi 6.5 that have connected an externally USB 3 RDX drive.

- The device is not recognized in the device manager of the VM.

- Inside the vSphere web client, I added successful the USB 3.0 controller, but can´t add a USB device.


Hardware and software specific data:

Hardware: HPE Proliant DL380 gen9 (Firmware Update according to HPE Service Pack for Proliant 2018.06.0)
Software: VMware ESXi 6.5 (current patch level: 6.5.0 Update 2 (build 8935087)

Until a week ago, the RDX drive was still detected. A hardware defect on the RDX drive I exclude, because a replacement drive was connected with the same error.
The RDX drive appears in the BIOS of the HPE server!
Does anyone have an idea where I could still look here.
Thanks in advance!



Greetings
Thomas

[RickVerstegen]

Is the VM still residing on the ESXi host were the externally USB Drive is connected to?

Also you can check, USB device passthrough requires:

Virtual hardware version 7 or higher

A USB controller

A USB device or device hub

The USB should be ext3 or FAT32 formatted

VMware Knowledge Base

[ThomasD1]

Hi RickVerstegen,

thanks for your reply.

Yes, the affected VM is still on the ESXi Hosts "datastore1".

The used Virtual Hardware Version is: 13

I have allready tried to delete shutdown the VM, delete the USB 3.0 Controller and re-enable it - without success.

The USB USB device is formatted correctly, because the RDX Device was working fine for over six months.

In the 4-week cycle, the VM had to be restarted because the drive had been lost.

Regards,

Thomas

[RickVerstegen]

If a USB device is connected to another virtual machine, you cannot add it until that machine releases it, so please verify.

Please restart management agent on the affected ESXi host and try again to add the USB device to the VM.

[jUDASmILExAlmig]

Hi Thomas

Which guest OS you are using? If it is Windows7 you need to install XHCI(USB3.0) controller driver first inside guest then go to device manager to see if it appears.