I have two identical APC UPS's that have USB controllers. I want to map both of the USB ports from the ESXI host to a VM and always have those USB devices reconnect, including if they are unplugged or the VM is restarted. Both of those devices have the same Vendor and ProductID though. When I restart the VM or unplug and replug the cords only one USB device gets reconnected. Are there any solutions for this?
2 Answers
At this time there is no auto-reconnect feature for the USB devices.
My suggestion if you're concerned about shutting down VMs within VMware is that you would look into the powerchute software that either connects over the network to each computer individually or use the integration of the UPS with the VMware servers themselves and set up alarms/actions to gracefully shut down the servers.
I was able to get this to persist through a reboot & usb disconnect/reconnect. I had to edit the VMs .vmx & change usb.autoConnect.device0
to autoclean:0
. Referenced this VMware KB. As long as I insert the USB plugs back into the same USB slot it works.