Making barcode scanners and RFID readers work with VMWare

So, you need to use a barcode scanner  RFID tag reader, or other device that presents itself as generic HID device. VMWare likes to deal directly with HID devices and it isn’t immediately obvious how attach your HID device to a virtual machine. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Power down the Guest VM.
  2. Edit the Guest VM settings. We need to turn off the USB option “Automatically Connect at Power On” or the VM will steal our keyboard and mouse leaving us without control of the host. Now that we’ve avoided locking ourselves out of the system, lets continue.
  3. Browse to the directory which stores your Guest VM. We need to open the .vmx file which contains all the configurations for that VM. Use Notepad or the equivalent to open the file.
  4. If there is an entry for “usb.generic.allowHID” modify it to “TRUE”, otherwise add the following line at the end of the document:

             usb.generic.allowHID = “TRUE”

  5. Save the .vmx file, and start the Guest VM. You’ll now be able to manually attach the devices to the Guest VM.