AnywhereUSB
Saturday Jun 21, 2008
I have had 3 projects come up recently that have pretty crazy device requirements. While the Sun Ray solution is very capable of dealing with tens of thousands of peripherals some times the best way to deal with a peripheral is to get out of the way and let Windows handle it directly.
There are several products on the market that do USB over IP. Essentially it is a device that has USB ports and an Ethernet port. You install the Windows based software, configure the device with an IP, and the Windows Software will make Windows think it has an attached USB port even though that USB port is across the network.
I am betting I am going to need one of these in one of my up coming projects. If you have read my blog you know I like to learn by doing. So after a spectacular display of list minute eBay bidding, I wound up with a Digi AnywhereUSB.
The device arrived during the week, but today was the first day I had some cycles to look at it. The instructions are very straight forward. Install the Windows software, it will find the device on your network, allow you to configure it and assign it to the computer. Once assigned it will install a USB driver and like magic you have USB ports in your Windows machine.
Look out ahead, HUGE SPEEDBUMP! As my USB drivers where installing Windows nicely presented me with installation failed. When I went to look at device manager, the devices where there with the infamous yellow explanation point over them. After a couple of searches at digi.com that returned errors, I finally convinced their search engine to return some links to their knowledge base. Luckily the answer to my problem was in the knowledge base. It seems as though Windows is smart enough to know it is not installing on bare metal and it leaves out part of the USB subsystem when you install in a VM. The article explains how to copy the necessary files over to the Windows System folder of the VM. You then need to uninstall the AnywhereUSB software and reboot. When the box comes up, you start the process over and lo and behold this time everything installed like a charm.
Now the big test. Would it actually work? I decided to use my wife's Windows mobile phone as a test device. I installed ActiveSync, plugged the phone into the Anywhere USB, and like magic Windows said it found a new device, installed the drivers, and showed the phone connected to ActiveSync.
Below are some shots of a Motorala Q connected to a Windows VM through an AnywhereUSB, being display on a Sun Ray.
Technorati Tags: Sun Ray, Virtualization, Windows
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