FAQ: USB Device Server

Can I use my device server on VMWare ESX Server or Citrix Server or Microsoft Hyper-V?

Yes. It is compatible in general.

Please make sure that the drivers for USB are installed, our system depends on the Windows drivers, so if your virtual system does not have any USB hub hardware the drivers for USB might be not installed. 

Since ESX Server or Hyper-V does not provide direct support for USB, USB drivers are not installed in the guest operating system by default. The software SX-Virtual Link depends on the USB core files to install properly. To enable the rest of the installation to proceed normally, copy and rename the required file from the original operating system CD. 
• Source: usbd.sy_ in the I386 directory of the CD 
• Destination: usbd.sys in the  system32 drivers directory of the guest operating system 
If this does not work you might need to extract the file from the "driver.cab" and copy it to the given location.

Hyper-V is supported as far as we can say in any version. ESX is supported in 3.5 and vSphere 4.0 - 4.1 is not tested.

After copying this file, reboot your machine. You can then continue with the normal SX-Virtual Link installation. 
Please make sure that your guest OS has direct access to the network. NAT is not supported.
Hyper-V is not yet offically tested, the information about the support of Hyper-V is at the moment based on experience from Microsoft technical support. Please test on non-productive systems in advance.

 

Can I use a device server also on a terminal session server?

Yes. SX-VL can also be installed on a terminal session server, as long as the operating system below is listed up to be compatible for SX-VL.

The USB device is then available as if it was locally connected and any user logged in on the server can use it with any application that also works when the USB device is locally connected. Terminal session users do not have their own device manager so the device can not be assigned to only a specific user. Once a USB device is connected it is available for all users loged in on the same server.

For usage of a USB device on a Windows Server based operating system you might need to make sure that you have "multi user" drivers for your USB device. Please check with the manufacturer of your USB device if this is supported.

As long as SX-VL operates on device manager level it can only get started once. This is to avoid the situation that user 1 connects and user 2 at the same moment disconnects a USB device. We recommend to either use a specific user to connect to all devices or to install SX-VL as a service. If there is absolutely a need to enable single users to connect/disconnect you can use the script based version and create a .bat file on the desktop for example.

It is possible to connect to USB device 1 and 2 connected to USB device server 1 from maschine 1. Machine 2 can connect to USB device 3 and 4 on the same device server and in addition to USB device 1 on device server 2.

It is not possible to connect with machine 1 and 2 to one USB device at the same time. Any other connection is possible.

One device server can handle up to 15 USB connections with a USB hub. The hub also already counts as at least 1 connection.

 

Does the device server support Linux?

No, the drivers for the virtual USB port are only available for the listed OS, Linux is not available. 
The problem is that we either need to develop the drivers completely on our own or use the standard libaries and release the driver under open source licences.

The only function available from any operating system that supports TCP/IP is IP printing over LPR, RAW or IPP.

 

How can I install SX-VL as a service?

Please use the linked PDF to install SX-VL or any other application as a service. The files you need are included in the Micrsoft developer kit and can be found easily on the internet with google for example.

Please keep in mind that user who starts SX-VL needs to have the corresponding favorites / settings for the USB device when you right click on the USB device in SX-VL. The favorites / settings for a USB device are always user related. So if the user "SYSTEM" starts the service please make sure that this user has the corresponding favorites. You might need to enable interaction with desktop for the service once to define the favorites or just use the Administrator account to run the service.

Download the manual

Download the files


There are backslashes missing. Please add them to the path.

troubleshooting:
1. With SRVANY can start any application as a service. Instead of connect.exe you can also start calc.exe. If the calculator also does not start the configuration is wrong. Please check the PDF again.
2. If only connect.exe does not start it will probably also give you an error message when you start it manually. Please check if you have the latest version of SX-VL installed and if your operating system is supported.

 

SX-VL keeps disconnecting from a USB dongle - how can I avoid that?

Most software copy protection dongles have features integrated that they reset the USB communication every now and then. This leads to a disconnect from the USB device connected to the device server.

The graphical version of SX-VL does not check that often if the USB device is disconnected and also does not attemp to reconnect unlimited times, it assumes that the user first has to reestablish the network connection or make the USB device available again.

Especially on server based systems this leads to a situation where the Software that is checking for the dongle stops working.
Best solution is to use the script based version of SX-VL and have the command to connect again run every few minutes with the task manager.
If the dongle is still connected the SX-VL CUI will just let you know that the USB device is already connected. If it was disconnected the USB device will automatically reconnect.