Vmware View use of USB Document Camera

Since the roll out of  VMware View has been so successful here at Northern Kentucky University I was asked to look into using VMware View to replace the classroom computers. While I personally believed this wasn't the best fit for VMware View I still figured I would see if it was capable of it from a technical stand point.

One of the requirements for this was the use of External USB devices like document cameras. I borrowed a Epson ELPDC11 and connected it via USB to my Windows 7 machine. Windows 7 found and installed the correct drivers and I followed by loading the document camera software and ensure that it worked on my Windows 7 Machine.

Document Camera working from Physical Machine

Now I closed the document camera software and used VMware View to connect to another Windows 7 VM. On that View VM I installed the document camera software like I did on physical machine. Launching the software it fails to find the document camera; this is expected because I have to tell VMware View to connect to the USB device. To do this from the toolbar chose "Connect USB Device" make sure there is a check next to the Document Camera.

VMware View Connect USB Document Camera

Vmware View Client may fail to connect to the document camera because the device is in use by my physical machine. 

Unable to Connect 'Seiko Epson EPSON ELPDC11' device. Device may be in use by another application."

unable to connect to Vmwware View USB Device

This is because some software on the physical machine still has control of the device, close the software there and any background process that maybe listening for button presses on the document camera. Once that software is found and closed the View should now allow the USB connection to the device. Windows 7 should now find and install the driver. Once that completes now the document camera software should connect.

Results 

Document Camera  connect to Vmware View

So the VMware View VM successfully connects to the document camera but its very laggy and fails to get a clean picture. This is just a guess but I'd bet the connection is to slow for the constantly updating picture. I left this running for 20 minutes it never managed to sync the entire picture before it continued back to nearly all grey.

My VM's are running hardware version 8 with View Agent 5 on ESXi 5.0. I tested with both VMware View Client 4.6 and 5.0 and while I got slightly better results with 5.0 it wasn't very much. Basically client version 5.0 displays more of the image before going all grey.

I"ve looked for more information but not found much. Vmware says USB redirection performance is affected by processing speed and for my test I was using 2 CPU 3 GHz machine. Luckily we aren't using Hardware Thin Clients because of my previous work on Creating our Thin Clients but I wouldn't think they would provide better results (Let me know if i'm wrong on this).

I've also looked at the Vmware View KB post here for a way to make the USB faster but haven't found any. Looking at thinkvirt.com explains the cause more but no solution.