I am having a tough time in getting USB 3 work with VMWare Player 12 on Windows 7.
Host – Gigabyte 880GM USB3 board with Etron USB 3 controller. AMD Athlon CPU, 12GB RAM, Windows 7 64
Guest – VMWare Player 12, Windows 7 64, 4GB RAM, USB 3 enabled in VM configuration and successfully installed the recommended Intel(R)_USB_3.0_eXtensible_Host_Controller_Driver_5.0.3.42 in Guest Windows 7
The issue is when I connect a USB 2 or USB 3 pen drive at Host USB 3 port it is just not detected in the VM at all. Only once it mysteriously appeared but when I tried to connect it gave ‘Host is using the device’ error, but then no files or even explorer window was open on host.
I even tried installing the Etron drivers in Guest but it fails.
I think there’s some incompatibility between the Etron Host device and the Intel USB 3 controller driver. There’s no issue with USB 2 ports at all.
What else can I try?
Best Answer
The VMware Support article USB 3.0 support for Windows 7 virtual machine in VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion (2128105) lists the following conditions:
USB Controller
, theUSB compatibility
needs to be set to3.0
.However, not all hardware configurations are supported. The most recent VMware article I have managed to find is Host and guest OS USB 3.0 and virtual xHCI support with Workstation 9 (2041591) which lists the supported configurations, and where the Etron USB3 controller is not listed as supported.
Even though the article is for Workstation 9 and not Workstation 12, this might be taken as an indication that your controller is unsupported, meaning that you meed to stay with USB2.