Monday, March 16, 2009

Access your Digital Camera from a VM

Recently one customer had asked me about using a VM to test USB connected devices like Digicams. I knew that USB devices was something that was not supported by enterprise class hypervisors (ESX, XenServer).

So decided to give it a shot using desktop hypervisor Virtual Box from Sun. Attached the USB digicam to my desktop (did not have any specific drivers on the desktop). Created a VM using VirtualBox and attached the USB device to it. The USB device appeared in the VM and on installing the digicam drivers in the VM, was able to access the digicam contents from the VM. Wow!!!

Virtualbox seems to use some filter drivers to bypass the USB device to the VM. Believe VMWare workstation should also definitely have a similiar functionality, but I have always been a big fan of the sleek and lightweight hypervisor from VirtualBox.

Isn't that a cool feature

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