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Using USB Devices in a Virtual Machine

Parallels Workstation Extreme provides you with the possibility to connect up to eight USB 2.0 and eight USB 1.1 devices to a single virtual machine. This means that you can plug up to eight USB 2.0 devices and eight USB 1.1 devices into the physical computer and use them from the virtual machine. To use this feature, you should add a USB controller to the virtual machine configuration. If the USB controller is already present in the virtual machine configuration, make sure it is enabled.

To connect a USB device to a virtual machine running on a Linux host computer:

Note: To connect a USB device to a virtual machine, you should have the root privileges.

  1. Connect the USB device to your physical computer.
  2. Start the virtual machine and log in to the virtual machine guest OS.
  3. When the guest OS boots up, connect the USB device by clicking the USB Controller icon in the virtual machine's window status bar and choosing your USB device name from the list.

Troubleshooting

After connecting the device, you may need to get access to the files in /proc/bus/usb. The way of accessing these files depends on your Linux distribution. You may try to access these files as root or try to use the following command:

sudo chmod -R 777 /proc/bus/usb

You need to issue this command each time you want to reconnect to the device or connect a new USB device.