18 Feb
2010
18 Feb
'10
8:27 a.m.
VirtualBox allows access to USB devices as well, and I think you can allow it raw access
to an IDE/SATA drive, but apart from that I don't know what else it will allow.
________________________________
From: Keith <keithvz at verizon.net>
To: General at olddell.com; On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thu, February 18, 2010 10:21:07 AM
Subject: Re: VMware appliances
Dave McGuire wrote:
On Feb 18, 2010, at 5:02 AM, Christian Corti wrote:
VMware can, FYI.
-Dave
I hate to agree with Dave (grin), but yes, you have access to pretty much all of the
standard hardware and ports.
Most of what I've used has been USB based.
Someone asked about scanners, yes, this definitely works.
You select a pull down menu to "connect" the hardware to the VM. When you are
done using it, you uncheck the option, and then the host has access to the hardware again.
This is true for USB devices, CD/DVD burners, etc.
While there are better options, I had a USB flash drive connected to the VM, copied some
files, connected back to the host, and now the drive shows up in host. Interesting
because you are moving data from one place to another via some hardware on exactly the
same machine.
This process generally just works.
Keith
Really? I
thought it allowed some access to real hardware.
The problem with VMs is that there is no access to real hardware at all, everything's
virtualized. There may be an exception for USB devices, but neither VirtualBox nor
KVM/qemu map real hardware in a 1:1 fashion.