Customer Reviews

Digi Intl. ANYWHERE USB/5 REM I/O-CONC ( 301-1130-01 )

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a bit lengthy, but a real world application of this tool, allowing me to give it 5 stars without batting an eye.

In this modern IT age it's surprising that software vendors of major applications still force us to use the USB "dongle" in our network for license management. We have multiple applications in our environment that rely on a dongle being connected to the distributing license server for users to be able to access a particular application.

Recently we migrated our server infrastructure from physical servers to virtual - and our virtualization product of choice was VMWare's ESX server. During testing it became apparant that access to USB devices on the servers motherboard would not be capable even in VMWare's latest 3.5 release (with no expectation for any future support). The first alternative was to run non-virtualized machines for these annoying dongles. Now we would be extremely limited in our disaster recovery and backup of these devices. They are off our SAN and in the case of disaster we would be screwed (our RTO basically out the window). There was also the issue of a single point of failure for these license keys (another fantastic reason why developers still relying on the dongle for commercial or enterprise software licensing are idiots, wake up people).

Now, imagine a product that I could rack up in an off site data center (connected via MPLS or some other IPSec VPN), and mount on a virtualized machine as if it were local to that machine. Now, my license dongles are not even in our building, they are in our off-site disaster recovery location (secure in a Tier IV data center). Users can access them through our local virtualized server, which is of course backed up continually. Should our primary data center go down I don't have to worry about the keys. They are IP based so our network never changed. The new VM that boots will connect to the same USB switch and provide the keys to our users. Our RTO would not be affected at all...

I could not have deployed this type of solution if it were not for this product. The amount of money invested in virtualization, disaster recovery, and rack leasing off site would have been largely wasted due to the lack of ability to provide licensing of certain business critical applications...! For the cost depending on your scenerio this is a "no duh" product.

Therefore, 5 stars.

The Anywhere USB works as advertised. I'm running two USB printers from a Win2003R2 server in another location. Worked well for me because one of the printers only works as a local printer. Couldn't even get it to work with an HP printer USB printer server. The only set up problems I had were fixed by unplugging the power from the Anywhere USB and plugging it back in.

Well, perhaps only a few steps. But, first you have to buy an expensive item (minus one star). Once over the sticker shock, and after a couple of installation steps, the device works as advertised. Outstanding! I use it in the laboratory to control equipment at a distance. That way, I can remotely control equipment in a refrigerator without freezing my bippy.

The product works as advertised - I seamlessly operate USB peripherals connected to my network. From the user's perspective - everything is the same. I have noticed the speed tends to be slow - I would not recommended this for USB storage devices. Configuring a USB camera with a GUI on my desktop works exactly as if it were plugged into my computer. For downloading programs to a circuit board using a USB jtag device - the performance is maybe 3 times slower than if it is directly plugged into my computer. This is why I do not recommend this device for remote storage devices such as an external hard drive. I highly recommend it for anything else. I will be using this device to remotely control a camera over a wireless network.

My name is Greg, and I had a VMware dongle problem...

I purchased some middleware from our PBX vendor, to support a CRM application, which required the use of a USB license key (dongle). Normally, USB dongles are plugged into a USB connector on a PC or server, but our environment is VMware, and the server is a VM (virtual machine). In our environment, there are 12 VMs that run on 3 physical Dell 2950 servers (VMware hosts). We use Vmotion, which allows us to drag a VM to any running VMware host. Vmotion allows us to move all of the VMs off a particular host so the host can be serviced. Since the AnywhereUSB/5 provides a network-attached USB port, it is ideal for our environment.

I have successfully moved the VM that runs the middleware application to another VMware host, however the application lost connection with the USB dongle, and I had to restart the application, but it came right up and continues to run fine in its new location. I will test this again, and call the Digi technical support to determine whether it can be done without losing connection, and check back in with an update to this review when I know the answer. In the meantime, I am happy with what this product does for me.

By the way, the AnywhereUSB/5 is located at our disaster recovery site, allowing the production VMware data center to use it, as well as the DR VMware data center to use it in the event of a DR failover. We use DoubleTake to replicate our production VMs to other VMs waiting at our DR site.

Greg