USB tuner in VMware ESXi recognised but no channels scan

[Reddwarf]

I've had past experience with a couple of companies trying to run tuners in in VMWare, both USB and PCIe. We found that drivers for these types of devices were generally flakey inside a VM. Some devices work better than others. Some don't work at all. Lots of unexpected pauses starting devices (sometimes minutes). I think it largely came down to the drivers expecting certain operations to complete a lot quicker than they were in a VM.

Using a network tuner was better, and largely worked. Even then, if you're attempting to watch video or transcode though, you're probably better off doing it on better metal - these activities are pretty CPU intensive, and you very quickly notice the virtualized CPUs are a lot slower than real metal.

All in all, attempting to use the tuners in a VM was frustrating experience, and we quickly went back to real hardware.

I can confirm that. For a while I had a npvr client running under Linux using Vine and that worked fairly well, a VM just adds a lot more overhead and most drivers won't work at all.