I’m running Win7 64-bit on a Dell Optiplex 780, and have many Virtual Machines using the built-in VM support (VPC). I have a VM that I connect to a network using a USB-to-Ethernet adapter (Belkin USB 10/100 Ethernet Adapter) and everything works fine… with the exception I would like a faster link. That is why I bought the Gigabit Adapter. Even though I won’t enjoy the full 1000 Mb bandwidth, I should see about 1/2 of it. Unfortunately I’m unable to get the Gigabit Adapter to work in a VM (Win XP SP3 32-bit). This adapter does work on stand-alone XP and Win7 platforms, so I know the device is okay. Is there a work-around for this or is there a fix in the works or do I need to return the Gigabit Adapters I purchased and go buy the Belkin?
Symptoms are that the VM freezes. Other times I see the VM running VERY slow.
Thanks for posting to our support forum. We’ll be happy to help.
We haven’t seen this issue before, so we did some testing, here’s what we found:
We were able to share the USB Gigabit connection with our Virtual XP machine, this worked as expected.
We weren’t able to assign it to the Virtual XP instance on our Window 7 host. The VM performance slowed way down while the Gigabit Ethernet adapter was attached to the virtual machine and, it never established a connection.
We have seen reports of it working in VMware on Mac so I suspect it’s a compatibility issue between Dell VPC and the Asix drivers. I’ll do some more digging on that…
Is it possible to share the host connection, or is it necessary for your setup to assign the USB Gigabit Ethernet Adapter to the Virtual Machine?
Let us know if it’s possible to run with a shared connection, and I’ll do some more research and contact the maker of the chipset and post back with my findings.
Thanks for your patience while we figure this out,
Jerome
Plugable Technologies
Thanks for the quick response. So you are experiencing the same thing I am, which is good (from a support perspective). I’ve just tested using the Gigabit Adapter on my Dell XPS Laptop with Win7 64-bit and a WinXP Pro SP3 as the VM, and I could share the adapter and load the driver from Windows Update, it just wouldn’t connect (Ipconfig said “media disconnected”). So the only thing different this time is that I’m not experiencing the “freeze” or slow down.
I need completely separate connections to totally disparate networks, so that is why I’m looking at USB-to-Ethernet adapters. I will test using VMware and post the results.
I just installed the Gigabit Adapter on a 32-bit WinXP Pro SP3 VM using VMware Player 4.0.1 hosted on my Dell XPS Laptop with 64-bit Win7. The Gigabit Adapter driver installed without any problems using Windows Update. The adapter then connected to my network and seemed to work without any issues.
So, it looks like the issue is with Win7, and I don’t have the time or the stomach to deal with Microsoft on this issue. Even though the adapter seems to work with VMware, that’s not the environment I’m using. I guess I need to look for another adapter.
I just finished testing the Gigabit Ethernet adapter in VMware with success. I’m glad to hear your results were similar. According to ASIX, Windows 7 XP mode is a “stream-lined” environment so, as you suspected, they pointed to Microsoft support.
Our 10/100 Ethernet adapter does work under XP mode. Here’s a link, if you’re interested~