Maybe the downfall of residential virtualization will be lack of USB support. Until they can provide USB for silly little devices such as logitech webcams, ipods, and thumb drives virtualization will never make it in the home. It is pretty easy to design a virtual nic, allow a virtual machine to get online, and even send it traffic for webhosting, but updating an iPod?

Parallels now offers USB 2.0 support:

• NEW! USB 2.0 support - “Plug and play” popular USB devices like external hard drives, printers, and scanners, and use them at full native speed.
  • NOTE! Current Build 3094 doesn’t support isochronous devices such as web cameras, microphones, etc.

This is a start. As most mac owners only have quality usb devices, since people don’t write mac drivers for crappy hardware, unlike windows 98 and xp where ever thing with a cord may have a windows driver. It would be nice to see support for iPods in the bootcamp and osx side of the mac. Maybe even inside of parallels in the near future.

But most virtualization development is focused towards the corporate enviroment, where people are disabling the usb ports and filling them in with super glue or gluing the cords into the computer:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=319

So will we see that is isn’t a priority so will it happen? It may end up being better to use networked devices. I think this is a push for the next generation of music players to wireless and not usb based.

VMware Fusion also laid down two new features that Parallels quickly matched in a beta release of its own. Both products provide direct access to USB 2.0 devices, an especially cool feature given that OS X has such a tiny selection of drivers for add-on USB 2.0 devices. Now you’ll be able to plug in some high-speed external peripherals. “Some” isn’t a quantity I can define yet; I’m working on that as I type. Parallels gets points for stating that it lacks isochronous USB device support, meaning that streaming devices like web cams, video capture and microphones will have to wait. What virtual USB 2.0 support does give us is access to devices that are covered by drivers for Windows, Linux, BSD, or whatever your guest OS happens to be. This doesn’t create a magical bridge through which OS X will be able to talk to an unsupported USB device through another OS’s driver, or those created for Windows (et al) by third parties. But if the performance is anywhere near native as Parallels claims it is, USB 2.0 support in a Parallels or VMware virtual guest OS is a major win.

complete article

Time will tell what we will see for support for hardware. As the demands grow someone will answer the call. The wider the variety of hardware any virtual environment supports the more it will be accepted by the users.

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