Unable to Passthrough USB security key to a virtual machine on ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and newer versions

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• You connect a USB license dongle to an ESXi host
• The host properly recognizes the device and passthrough can successfully be enabled on host level
• However, when attempting to attach the device to a virtual machine, the reconfiguration fails with

"Cannot connect "patch:X/X/X" to this virtual machine. The device was not found."

• Looking in /var/run/log/vmkernel.log, you find the following errors:

  vmkernel.log
  ..
  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.xxxZ cpu7:3750740)VSCSIFs: 4208: handle 8258(vscsi0:1):Invalid Opcode (0x4d) from (vmm0:<vm_name>)
  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.xxxZ cpu7:3750740)VSCSIFs: 4208: handle 8257(vscsi0:0):Invalid Opcode (0x4d) from (vmm0:<vm_name>)

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Resolution

To allow the passthrough:

• shutdown and power off the virtual machine
• edit the .vmx configuration file
• add the following lines to the file:

  usb.generic.allowCCID = "TRUE"
  usb.ccid.disable = "TRUE"

• Save the file, then attach the passthrough device and power the virtual machine back on again

Additional Information

certain devices might require additional settings. If the issue still persists with the above configuration, please refer to https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/380954