VMware

I ran into a situation recently where a client needed a USB drive connected directly to a VMware ESXi 4.1 host. As many of you know, getting USB pass-through working is a challenge in itself. There are lots of requirements to be met at both the host level and the guest VM level. The strange part was that I seemingly met all those requirements.

I had already added my USB bus controllers through Configuration –> Advanced Settings on the ESXi host. I had rebooted. Seemingly everything looked great and appeared as if it were passing through. I confirmed my VM was running Hardware Version 7 and I added the USB Controller without incident. However, the USB devices were greyed out and when I selected it I received the following message.

There are no USB devices connected to the host.

Initially, I had enabled all USB buses for pass-through. What I ultimately found was that by disabling the EHCI USB bus back in Configuration –> Advanced Settings, along with another reboot, did the trick. The above message went away and USB devices were no longer greyed out. I was then able to add my USB drive to my VM without incident.

The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 1, which is less than required: 2

The number of heartbeat datastores for host is 0, which is less than required: 2

I ran into these errors recently after configuring High Availability on a brand new VMware ESXi 5.1 cluster. I had used SanDisk cards for my ESXi operating system and planned to use a LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance with only one LUN so I was only going to ever have one shared datastore. I knew I would have to squelch this error right away.