Unraid VM USB Hot Plug

Windows Device Manager with USB Devices
USB Controllers in a Windows VM

Once you have basic GPU passthrough configured, you can get near bare-metal performance in a VM on Unraid using KVM under the hood. However, one thing that is a little awkward are USB devices. The host, in this case Unraid, owns, initializes, and configures USB devices by default. This gets even more complicated when you consider that Unraid boots off a USB device rather than another drive in the system.

Here we’ll look at how you can get close to hot-plugging USB devices into a VM. In a future post we’ll take it a step further to get near-baremetal functionality just like we did with the GPU.

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