Truenas Scale - How to mount USB into VM like W10 or Linux etc

[draco76x]

Newbie here on Truenas, I just installed Truenas Scale & installed VM Win10.

I have hit a problem, intend to attached a USB drive to VM so that I can copy file.
Tried finding the PCI address on the shell using "lspci" then based on the address to create a device for passthrough but it does not work.

Anybody have any solution to get a USB mounted on VM??
Appreciate the help & advice.

 

[sretalla]

Anybody have any solution to get a USB mounted on VM??

You need to pass the entire USB controller (so it has to have nothing connected to it that is used by the host OS).

 

[draco76x]

Using the command "lspci -knn", I found that all the device is in use by the Kernel, is this the reason that i cannot do a pass through for the USB controller??
If yes, how to counter this issue??

 

[sretalla]

It talks about iohyve, but the PCI part is relevant, I think:

iohyve / bhyve USB controller passthrough goodness

I used to have a Windows machine that was dedicated to running software for our printer since the open-source software wouldn't scan and pr...

baitisj.blogspot.com

For general reference (and giving you more clues how to make sure it goes right after a reboot (you'll need to use loader tunables, not edit the loader.conf directly):

bhyve/pci_passthru - FreeBSD Wiki

 

[KrisBee]

Newbie here on Truenas, I just installed Truenas Scale & installed VM Win10.

I have hit a problem, intend to attached a USB drive to VM so that I can copy file.
Tried finding the PCI address on the shell using "lspci" then based on the address to create a device for passthrough but it does not work.

Anybody have any solution to get a USB mounted on VM??
Appreciate the help & advice.

You need USB passthrough not PCI passthrough, and as you've probably discovered in TRUENAS SCALE you can't add a "USB passthorugh device" to a VM.

 

[sretalla]

OK, so I for some reason never look at the breadcrumbs to see that it's SCALE and not CORE that is asked about.

My point stands... you need to pass through the PCI device which is the entire USB controller that you will connect the device to.

I don't see a barrier to that in SCALE.

 

[KrisBee]

My point stands... you need to pass through the PCI device which is the entire USB controller that you will connect the device to

Fine, it nothing else hangs off the same USB controller or it doesn't share PCI address. KVM perfectly able to pass through individual USB devices, it's just it's not implemented in TrueNAS scale.

 

[linbing]

usb over network.

USB over Network - share USB devices over Ethernet

USB over Network - Share USB devices over network or the Internet. USB for Remote Desktop - Redirect USB over RDP or Citrix ICA

www.usb-over-network.com

 

[Ixian]

USB Passthrough for VMs has been accepted as an enhancement request on Jira, so it's just a matter of when they get around to implementing it. I don't see any new activity on it so I don't believe it's even in the nightlies yet. This, along with importing/exporting virtual disks, are the last remaining "major" bits to bring a fully-realized VM management system to fruition IMHO.

You can manually attach USB devices via the virsh cli, like you would with any other KVM install, however the middleware will overwrite custom configs like this. I was not able to successfully get a Google Coral USB device, for example, to stay attached.

As others mentioned PCI passthrough is supported in the GUI so if you can pass through the entire USB controller/PCI device (i.e. nothing else is on it that you don't want dedicated to do the VM) you can do this otherwise need to wait for the beta to evolve.

USB network redirects are situational - the free projects that do this have performance issues in my experience, the paid ones (linked in previous post) are pretty expensive.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I have hit a problem, intend to attached a USB drive to VM so that I can copy file.

Can't you connect the drive to your local system and copy the file via your RDP session?