[GLLUG] Does any virtualisation system provide good support for USB device forwarding?

[John Winters]

On 08/04/14 13:39, James Roberts wrote:
[snip]
> I'd love to have an update later when you succeed (or fail :(

Well - as far as I can see it seems to work well.  Obviously I've only 
had half a day or so of playing with it, but USB device forwarding seems 
to work very satisfactorily in KVM.  The tools for configuring VMs also 
seem much more sophisticated than in Xen.

This then leads me to a difficult decision.  I have an existing 
investment in about half a dozen Xen VMs, which have proved really easy 
to move between Xen hosts as I upgrade hardware (or replace a server 
damaged by a nearby lightning strike, but that's a different story).

There are lots of HOWTOs on the net about how to migrate existing VMs 
from Xen to KVM, but they all run up against a fundamental difference in 
how the two do disk allocation.  Xen expects to have several devices - 
one for swap, and one for each mountable partition - whilst KVM expects 
to be passed a whole disk (albeit not a real one) which it then 
partitions for swap, boot etc.  Any kind of conversion will therefore be 
a messy compromise.

I'm left wondering whether to re-create all my VMs from scratch, or just 
stick with Xen for now.

Some thought needed...

John