Add USB device to powered on VM

[luckywangxu]

I have an Ubuntu 22 VM, with open-vm-tools installed, on a ESXi 8.0u1 host.

I could add a USB device to that VM while it was powered on.

But if I passed-through a PCI-e device, like a video card, to that VM, adding a USB device while the VM was on never worked anymore. It failed with message "Failed to reconfigure virtual machine Ubuntu Server. The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered on)."

What did I miss?

[Maksym Roshchyna]

Take in mind also vmware tools maybe there are newest already and VM hardware compatibility

[luckywangxu]

Adding both the PCI-E graphic card and the USB device while the VM was powered off worked well. Both of them could function normally. So that may seem to rule out 1, 2 and 3. As of 4, hot-pluging USB failed even when CPU, RAM and storage, of both the VM and the host, were quite enough. As of 5, as PCI-E passthrough were configured while the VM was powered off, no hot-pluging PCI-E device were involved.

I see there are restrictions while PCI-E passthrough is enabled, including suspending, migrating with vMotion, or taking or restoring snapshots. But hot-pluging USB device via arbitrator is not mentioned in any documentation as an  restriction with PCI-E passthrough present.

[luckywangxu]

Tried open-vm-tools version 12.1.5.39265 and 12.2.5.43614 (latest release on github), no luck.