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VMware ESX 4.1 (finally) supports USB device passthrough from an ESX or ESXi host to a virtual machine.
Requirements
USB device passthrough requires:

Virtual hardware version 7 or higher

A USB Arbitrator

A USB controller

A USB device or device hub

Limitations
The USB Controller has these limitations:

USB controller hardware and modules that support USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 devices must be present on the [...]

I’ve read about this presentation on Eric Sloofs Blog created by Nicholas Travers who works as a VMware Technology Consultant at EMC. The presentation is called “Storage Protocol Choices & Storage Best Practices for VMware ESX” and deals with storage considerations like:

How many VMs per LUN?
Standard LUN Size?
NFS, RDM or VMFS?
iSCSI, or FC?
How do [...]

Hi.
I’m pretty sure that the Checksum Offload causes a bunch of network slow downs – especially in a virtual environment.
Whenever a customer says that it takes a good few seconds to open i.e. a Word document, placed on a share, I always disable Checksum Offload wherever possible on the NIC, inside the VM. This has [...]

If you’ve upgraded to or installed ESX(i) 4.0 you’ll see that you have an advanced option to pick which virtual machine hardware version to use for your new VMs. As noted in the image below, the virtual hardware version will determine which other VMware products the VM can be run on. Virtual machine version 7 [...]