Switched On Tech Design

Tag: vm

  • How to pass through a USB device to a Windows Virtualbox VM

    Running a Mac with Windows running in a Virtualbox virtual machine? Here’s how to pass through a USB device so that whenever the VM (Virtual Machine) is running and the USB device is plugged into a USB port it appears in the Windows VM and not in Mac OS X. Open up Virtualbox and make sure that the Windows VM is not running:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-55-51-pm

     

    Click on “Settings” at the top and you should see this screen:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-56-07-pm

     

    Click on “Ports” (third from the right hand side in the icon menu at the top):

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-56-19-pm

     

    It defaults to Serial – click on USB:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-56-26-pm

     

    Nobody wants to be using USB 1.1 (slow) so click on USB 2.0:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-04-01-pm

     

    Then plug in your USB device that you want to pass through. In a nutshell, we will be setting up the specific USB devices we select on this screen to be passed through to the Windows VM whenever they are plugged in while the VM is powered on. If the virtual machine is closed down when you plug in the USB device the normal Mac OS X system will read the USB device as usual.

     

    Click on the icon on the right that has a little green plus and you should see a listing of USB devices that are eligible for passthrough:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-59-16-pm

     

    In this instance we are selecting the SanDisk Cruzer Blade. Click on it.

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-10-59-27-pm

     

    Now you should see it listed under “USB Device Filters”. The USB controller has been moved to USB 3.0 in the above screen shot – ignore that, as USB 3.0 currently does not work on Windows 7 VMs. Click OK, and go back to the main Virtualbox screen. Safely remove the USB device from your computer and then start the Windows virtual machine.

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-04-40-pm

     

    If you have only just selected USB 2.0 for the first time you will probably see the above screen. Otherwise, you can now plug your USB device in:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-05-12-pm

     

    …and it should be picked up as if it were plugged into a physical Windows computer:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-05-21-pm

     

    All done. Now, if you look in Finder in Mac OS X you won’t see the drive:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-05-42-pm

     

    Closing down the VM, though, and unplugging/reinserting the drive will make it show up as normal:

     

    screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-11-06-16-pm

     

    In the above screen shot it is appearing as “NO NAME”.

     

    All done! Incidentally, if you want a USB thumbdrive to work in both Windows and OS X you want it formatted into FAT32 or ExFAT rather than NTFS or Mac OS X Extended.

     

    If you wish to remove the USB device from the passthrough list, click on the USB device in the list and then click on the little red minus sign on the right hand side.

  • Proxmox KVM virtual machine: Cannot delete due to missing storage

    Today we encountered a situation where a Proxmox system’s KVM virtual machine refused to delete after the storage volume that it’s virtual HDD resided on was lost; trying to delete the KVM from the web GUI resulted in the following error:

     

    TASK ERROR: storage ‘proxmoxHDD’ does not exists

     

    Attempting to delete it from the command line using:

     

    qm destroy [VM ID]

     

    …resulted in:

     

    storage ‘proxmoxHDD’ does not exists

     

    Fortunately, there’s a way around this. The KVM config files live in:

     

    /etc/pve/qemu-server

     

    Move or erase the [VM ID].conf file and when you refresh your web GUI the VM should be gone.

  • How to kill a KVM virtual machine in Promox via the command line or terminal

     

    Sometimes a Proxmox KVM VM will stop responding to the GUI’s attempts to shut it down; fortunately it’s easy to shut it down from the command line. Make note of the VM ID (next to the name of the VM in the left pane of the Proxmox GUI), log into the server via SSH as root and run:

     

    qm stop [vmid]

     

    e.g.:

     

    qm stop 124

     

    Check back in the GUI a few seconds later and you should see that the KVM has stopped.

  • Proxmox 3.2: Enabling NFS on a container (CT) VM

     

    If you’re trying to figure out why you are getting NFS errors despite having NFS set up properly on the host machine and client VM, this may be the answer. With the VM powered off, run at the Proxmox terminal:

     

    vzctl set [VM ID] --features "nfs:on" --save


     

    The next time the VM is powered up NFS should be enabled and you should be able to mount shares correctly. An example:

     

    vzctl set 104 --features "nfs:on" --save


     

  • XenServer 6.2: Which VM type to use for Fedora 20 Live CD installation?

     

    We were asked this today – we have found that the “Other Media” works fine for installation and use, where other options (Red Hat options, for example) don’t work.