USB disk attached to physical or virtual machine?

[tech77]

Hello,

I have an ESX server with Veeam Backup installed on one virtual machine. I have a USB disk plugged into the ESX server and mapped into one of the other virtual machines so that it can be shared via Windows sharing. I have heard that the usb disk should be connected to a physical machine and then shared over the network. Can someone please advise on the best practices, benefits, or drawbacks for this configuration?

Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

We had a similar discussion a year ago when USB passthrough feature was introduced by VMware. Judging by the feedback, this seems to work pretty slow and I wouldn't recommend using it as a backup target for your backup jobs.

Thanks.

[tech77]

Thank You!

[asutcliffe]

We have the USB drive attached to a physical server with a drive mapped to it. We have a scheduled task set to robocopy files files modifies in the last 24 hours from our Veeam VM to the shared drive at a set time every day. We tried the USB passthrough method but it was miserably slow - the copy to physical server works fine though.