Subscribe Feed (RSS)The Sky Is Falling Because ESXi Does Not Support USB!
March 23rd, 2009 by Paul Sterley | Filed under ESXi, Hardware, Virtualization.Maybe you are lamenting the fact that ESXi currently does not support USB. Maybe you tell it to someone or adjust your thinking because of it a few times a week. A great many people are making a great deal of noise about it, and since the competition is so fierce in the virtualization market right now, I suspect it will be a non-issue very soon. I dearly hope so anyway. However, for the time being we keep running into potential deal-busters because of this very irritating issue.
We’ve heard about the Digi AnywhereUSB device – but hey man, that thing’s expensive, and I shouldn’t have to buy one or force my customer to buy one, should I?
I thought these devices were $350. Today I learned that their LIST price may be in that area, but their retail channel pricing is much lower. These devices can be had for as little as $250. External USB fax modems are cheap. In the same vein, older battery backup devices or things that use serial ports can be connected to over the network with a device that costs $110.
You can find them here:
Digi AnywhereUSB
Moxa NPort 5110 (multi-port models are also available)
Sure, this is inconvenient as hell, but let’s do a reality check. In order to connect a SCSI tape drive to a server, you need a SCSI controller card. We regularly sell SCSI cards to customers for $250 and nobody blinks. It’s just a device you need to make things work. Period. Nobody whines about it, because it is just the way it goes.
So I am here to say that we should not be so high-strung about the ESXi USB issue. We should instead treat it as one of those little necessities. Instead of asking in a hesitant, fearful tone whether there will be any local USB or serial devices involved, we should just mention that if they will need to do this, they will need another device to make it work. If the topic seems to cause consternation, shrug it off and minimize it. We should say “Yeah, but you can pick one of those up only $250.” like it is nothing – because, really, it isn’t a big deal.
Let’s put things into perspective. Many IT professionals charge their customers anywhere in the range of $100 to $150 per hour for labor. Even if the customer is unwilling to spend that money on hardware (even though they spend much more on labor), the IT professional could easily eat the cost of buying the device, write it off as an expense, and bill their customer for the installation and configuration of the device. Or they could just let it be absorbed in the bigger picture as time progresses. A good customer will accept that it is necessary, and buy it. A good IT professional will explain it to a customer in a way that will facilitate this, or just provide the device and be sure to bill enough to cover the expense. An IT “professional” who is not very good at what they do will make a big deal out of it and raise the customer’s fears and resistance to virtualization. Let’s set an example for them.
When someone wrings his/her hands and makes strangling noises about a little $110 device or even a $250 device to go along with a new server and a migration project, that person is being short-sighted, overly dramatic, or is looking for objections to Virtualization because it is outside their comfort zone – or all of the above. Those people need to shut up and get on with it. And stop whining.
Tags: anywhereusb, digi, ESXi, USB
Need I remind everyone that ESXi is FREE – understand that with that you have to work within certain constraints. Otherwise, put up the money for XP & install VMWare server. That way you get most of the features, and your beloved USB.
Now all I want is more iSCSI tape drives – there’s only one auto-loader that I’m aware of.
Yeah, right. ESXi is free because it has constraints (several btw) and not the other way around (it has constraints because it is free).
BusyBox, the OS on which ESXi is based, works with Linux kernels, and Linux kernels support USB and a lot of other things. Things that were left intentionally out of ESXi.
ESXi is a fairy tale and consequently not to be taken seriously.
I have ESXi in production at half a dozen customer sites, totaling more than two dozen virtual servers. It has reduced hardware costs hugely due to buying fewer servers, fewer hard disks that are prone to failure, fewer battery backup units, and requiring less air conditioning resources. It has increased flexibility of how the hardware is used dramatically. It has simplified and enhanced remote management, especially in cases where RDP stops responding during a reboot. Clean shutdown during overheat and power outages is handled via network cards in the battery backup units. Backup is, in some cases, handled via SCSI passthrough, and in other cases, via NAS device. It has also allowed me to re-use older servers and put multiple Windows Home Server instances on one piece of old hardware to back up workstations, adding extra value for the customer that we could not have done efficiently before. We’ve used those workstation backups to recover from virus infections and failed hard disks, saving the customer lots of money. Without virtualization, we would have needed three or four pieces of hardware to cover all of the workstations, and the customer would not have agreed to do it. If the customer had needed to pay for an additional hypervisor license, they would not have agreed to do it.
ESXi is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It does have some limitations, but it is a very good piece of free software. I and my customers take it very seriously.
You’re claiming it is a fairy tale based on the lack of USB, and some unmentioned nebulous other things. I dispute that. We don’t need the USB support, and we don’t miss it. Not having the USB hard disk support discourages hanging five USB disks off of your server to increase capacity (something I’ve had to clean up after other consultants did). It encourages planning ahead and implementing fast, scalable solutions instead of slow cheap ones.
Paul, i appreciate your accurate arguments and you thorough explanation, but i think that you are quoting only benefits of virtualization, in general, not ESXi.
Ah, good point, and I plead guilty as charged. I haven’t worked much with Hyper-V, but enough to know that I have a preference for ESXi. I haven’t worked with any others at all.
I won’t let this comment thread turn into a debate (pissing match) on the various pluses and minuses of different hypervisors (ESXi vs Hyper-V). That is a discussion that is well and truly over-argued in plenty of places, and is mostly irrelevant anyway. People will use what they have a preference for, and/or have familiarity with, and/or is appropriate for the technical and political requirements for their scenario. I did do a comparison article a while back, and tried to be fair and un-biased about it. Here it is: http://blog.bruteforcetech.com/index.php/archives/115
So I’ll just get back to basics and reinforce my two main points:
1. At the time this article was created, neither of the “industry leading” hypervisor developers (VMware and Microsoft) supported USB pass-through, and a lot of people made a big fuss about it. Recently, VMware is offering USB support in a very limited capacity, and I am of course interested, but am a lot less interested than I might have been a year ago, when I still thought it was a very important feature, and a terrible oversight to have left it out. Here’s an article about the limited support now being offered:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1021345
2. ESXi is not a toy, nor a fairy tale. Used intelligently within its limitations in an appropriate environment, it is a very useful tool. I have gained plenty of leverage using it, and so have many others – some of whom I have worked with directly.