So I'm trying to set up a VM with USB passthrough for a keyboard, mouse (via KVM switch) and USB sound card (passing through onboard audio is flaky.) For the life of me, I couldn't pass through the keyboard and mouse through standard USB passthrough. I even tried adding:
usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"
usb.generic.allowLastHID = "TRUE"
to the .vmx file. This seemed to accomplish nothing, and neither keyboard nor mouse became visible to the VM, though I could see the KVM (passing through the KVM did not allow the VM to see the child devices.) So I hit upon the idea of adding a PCI USB 2.0 adapter and passing it through to the VM. This sort of works. When the VM is initialized, the keyboard mouse and KVM are accessible to the VM. However, as soon as I use the KVM to switch to another (physical) machine, then switch back to the VM, the OS does *not* automatically add the mouse and keyboard back to the VM. Instead, I have to remote into it from another machine, go to Device Manager, and scan for new hardware (guest OS is Windows 8.1 Enterprise.) This will add the keyboard and mouse back to the VM, and allow full control of the desktop. This is very clumsy and inconvenient.
Does anyone know a) why I can't just pass through the host's keyboard and mouse and/or b) why Windows 8 will not automatically detect the keyboard and mouse when the KVM switches back to the VM? Is there a better way to approach this? Getting PCIe passthrough of the video card working was simple in comparison. I do want a VM that I can locally access with a keyboard and mouse attached to the host. If it matters, the host system is a Dell Precision T5500.