Error "No available USB Devices" while adding USB CD-ROM to a virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• ESXi host detects the connected USB CD-ROM and the same can be seen from the output of lsusb command
• On the ESXi host, we can see the USB CD-ROM under storage devices as "Local USB CD-ROM"
• When trying to add the USB CD-ROM  to the virtual machine, we get an error: "No available USB Devices"
• From the output of esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list command, the connected USB CD-ROM shows "passthrough disabled"

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

Cause

By design ESXi will emulate USB CDROM device as SCSI CDROM device and  USB passthrough is disabled

Resolution

To enable passthrough for the USB CDROM as normal USB Device, follow the below procedure

• Connect the USB CD ROM to the ESXi host
• Take an SSH session and execute the below command to enable usbCdromPassthroughEnabled switch

localcli system module parameters set --module=vmkusb --parameter-string="usbCdromPassthroughEnabled=1"

• Reboot the ESXi host
• Verify if the usbCdromPassthroughEnabled switch is set using the below command

localcli system module parameters list  --module=vmkusb

• Check if the USB CDROM is available for passthrough using below command

esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list

• Attach the USB CD ROM to the virtual machine