Important information about the new ESXi 6.5 USB driver vmkusb, and the legacy USB drivers

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

In ESXi 6.5, the legacy USB drivers, including xhci, ehci-hcd, usb-uhci, usb, usb-storage, and so on, are replaced with a single USB driver named vmkusb. The vmkusb driver is loaded by default and it is applied to all the USB Host Controllers (XHCI/EHCI/UHCI/OHCI), USB Keyboard, Mass Storage, and supported USB NIC devices connected to the host.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Resolution

You can disable the vmkusb driver by running esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=FALSE. The legacy USB drivers are loaded at the next reboot. To re-enable the vmkusb driver, run esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=TRUE, and reboot the host.

Additional Information

If the host will not boot completely to use the solution, please follow the below steps:

1. Reboot the ESXi host.
2. During the pre-boot splash screen, press SHIFT-O to modify the boot options.
3. In the resulting screen, add the following to the end of the boot line:

 

jumpstart.disable=vmkusb

4. Press the enter key to resume boot.

Note: When ESXi host comes up, vmkusb module will be disabled, and the solution can be followed to make the change permanent.

List of Supported USB devices :- Supported USB device models for passthrough from an ESX or ESXi host to a virtual machine
USB support in ESXi/ESX 4.1, ESXi 5.x, and ESXi 6.x