Virtual Box

Hello all,

Right, I have a question for you all. I guess, people here might have heard about VirtualBox before. It’s something similar to what VMware does. It a Virtual machine, but this a freeware from Sun Microsystems. Anyway, I was running into problem with the virtual box, which I need a solution now. Thought of all different solution from my side but nothing works.

I have a Virtual box running on my Windows XP Professional OS. And a Windows XP Prof on my Virtual Box as well. My host machine contains like 8 USB ports. What I want is to make like 4 USB ports dedicated to Virtual box and keep rest for the local host. When I say dedicated to virtual box, it should totally be invisible to the host machine. This is my requirement.

But, as far as my knowledge about the Virtual box, to mount the USB ports is not possible (I might be wrong here). But what you could say is if this device gets connected to any USB in the host, that device will be mounted automatically to the virtual machine. That, is the target device like web cam or something get plugged into anyone of the USB port then probably we have an option of saying the virtual box if this target device with so and so serial no gets connected, then it gets mounted to Virtual box.

But my requirement is to mount a pool of usb port to the virtual machine regards if the usb is attached to any device or not. When the virtual box starts it should mount like 4 ports automatically. For this to happen, I need some low level information of usb ports it self. How will I get the serial no etc of all the usb ports on my machine?

Thanks a lot guys!

ssharish

What you want is a USB passthrough which dedicates certain USB ports to your virtual machine exclusively. I know VMWare has this ability, can't remember if VirtualBox is capable of it though. So if you can't get it working in VirtualBox, try a different emulator.

Hi Sorrofix, I really appreciate your information on USB pass-through. But I lack the information on that concept. Could you please help in giving more information? May be some good source?

Thanks!

ssharish

Basically, passthrough means that the device (e.g. USB) is given directly to the controlling virtual machine, rather than being part of the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor, aka Hypervisor). This usually assumes that you give an entire device (e.g all USB ports of a particular USB host controller, as registers for each USB controller is usually shared).

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Mats