Can you passthru/assign different external usb hubs?

[DarkZenith]

I have been doing some searching and reading and understand that the issue with duplicate usb devices is that the system doesn't necessarily assign them in the same order every startup. I am planning on running x3 gaming systems for my kids off a dual Xeon E5-2670  rig with nvidia gtx 1060's. I have most of the components already and will be assembling in the next couple weeks. I was wondering if I was to invest in x3 different quality powered usb 3.0 hubs if those hubs can be seperately passed thru to the vm's and in turn have the devices attached then running the same. With my kids everything has to be the same to be fair so they will all have the same usb keyboard and mouse along with Cloud 2 Headsets (already have all of these).

 

    As I said I did a few searches and didn't find an answer to this specific question. I ask to confirm before making the investment on the hubs as with them still being usb devices I am unsure how the system/unRAID will respond to them as I *think* the usb chips for hubs may be standardized and don't necessarily have different device ids...

 

    Thanx, any advice would be appreciated.

[bungee91]

That will likely not work, however there's a solution.

Pass a USB card or device to each VM and you can plug in whatever you want to each, plus it'll then be hot pluggable.

Most motherboards have multiple USB controllers, so you may have three already by default, but will need one of them for UNRAID, so you may only have to add one to a Pcie 1x slot, and you'd be all set.

[DarkZenith]

Small problem with that is that I have no slots available.... I have x3 double slot gpus and those cover the other 3 pcie slots... Sigh.

[bungee91]

You may be exactly okay actually.

If you MB does allow the split of internal USB devices into a total of 3 (that seems to be the norm if it allows it; my previous Gigabyte board refused to split them up). So two Vm's have one of those three assigned, the other has the USB devices assigned in the VM (so not passing the entire controller to one of them) on the same USB card as the UnRAID flash drive.

You'll have to do some testing on your MB to find out how it assigns these. That and I hope you have a build that supports ACS on root ports considering what you're attempting to accomplish (for Intel, i7 "E" and Xeon E5 and up).

Details to split up the controllers here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=36768.0

[heratic]

Could look at getting flex riser cables to access the pcie slots under the gpu coolers