How to enable USB 3.0 in Horizon View 5.2

USB 3.0 is capable of transfer speeds of up to 5Gbps (gigabits per second); that's a little over 10 times faster than USB 2.0's 480Mbps. In practice, it won't always be this much faster — mileage may vary depending on hardware configuration — but it will always be much faster than USB 2.0 (USB 2.0 vs USB 3.0)

USB 3.0 devices are not supported in Horizon View 5.2 or earlier. The instructions below are The steps outlined below are TOTALLY UNSUPPORTED BY VMWARE. I recommend testing in development environment. If you decide to test or implement you are doing it on your own risk.

In order to enable USB 3.0 for Horizon View Windows soft-clients you will need to create a Windows registry key which enables Horizon View client to see USB 3.0 devices.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware VDM\Client\USB]
"AllowUSB3"="true"

For Horizon View Client for Mac OS X you will need to use the shell (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) to edit the settings. For more information on how to edit settings for Mac OS X refer to the documentation here.

#defaults write com.vmware.viewusb AllowUSB3 true

Confirm  with:

#defaults read com.vmware.viewusb

Depending on the USB 3.0 chipset you may have issues with Windows 7, Vista and XP Guest OSes.

To validate that USB3 functionality is enabled you should look for the following item in the log files

[vmware-view-usbd] DevFltr: Device Speed = Super

This article was first published by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) at myvirtualcloud.net.