Using a USB device with ESX… without. Has this ever happened to you? For one reason or another, you’ve been forced to suffer at the hands of a corporation that forces its customers to use hardware based methods to comply with licensing restrictions. These hardware methods often take the form of a USB-based dongle that has to exist physical on the server. Of course, as organizations continue to virtualize more and more of their environments; these hardware devices grow more and more bothersome. Although there are products on the market that allow virtualized servers to talk to USB hubs over TCP/IP, with VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware has added USB pass-through capability to ESX allowing you to skip the need to buy one of these TCP/IP devices and simply plug a USB device directly into your server.

USB devices are added to vSphere-based virtual machines in two steps:

You must add a USB Controller to any virtual machine to which you’d like to add a USB device.
You must then associate any installed USB devices to individual virtual machines.
Complete article here… 

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/general-virtualization-articles/using-usb-devices-vmware-vsphere-41.html

and for my reference.. in case the linked site ever goes down.. same article in PDF..
Using USB devices with VMware vSphere 4.1

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