VMWare tools install - and USB questions

[toppot]

I have been running 8.10 on a VMWare Server 2.0.3 for some time. Now I got a new physical server, and have installed VMWare ESXi 4.1 on this one.

I have now made a new Virtual Machine, and have installed 10.04. But I am in doubt:

When I "for fun" installed 10.04 in my VMWare Server, I installed VMWare tools prior to running CreateDiskless - now I did it after... It appears to be doing some compiling, and changing some of the files that are used when the diskless image is created - but VMWare tools are obviously not desired in physical MDs (and virtualized MDs can only be for testing)...

What is the better approach? And is VMWare tools even needed??

I am having some problems with USB passthrough. I can add the USB controller to my WM, and I can also add the USB devices. But nothing shows on the client, neither in lsusb or dmesg... (I figured that even if I could find no reference to USB in the VMWare tools docs it could be that it would solve it- but no).

I had USB passthrough working under WMWare Server - but actually not sure if it was on the LMCE machines or just some other virtual machines... The reason to change server is that the old one does not have USB 2.0, only 1.1 - and that is not fast enough for DVB-S tuners. These tuners can run on a MD, but my experience is that is the MD only has 1 gig of RAM, and half goes to graphics, then it is struggling to run a Myth backend (even with the master backend on the core).

I know others are using ESXi - are you successful with USB passthrough? And are you using 4.1 og 5.0?

EDIT: Newer mind the USB question - a reboot cured that  

Update: Now I got the Tevii S660 USB DVB-S2 tuner working   
So far I have been able to tune to the channels one 1 sat - I confused which cable went to which of my DISEqC switches (one committed, the other uncommitted) - and the very strange thing is that now both my sat box and Myth has them as committed... So perhaps it was a fluke that I finally got a transponder luck, but it was a quite persistent fluke... I could scan all transponder at that sat.

I recorded 1 show - but it seems to record full of artifacts (when I stream to a PC). Does anybody have ESXi experience with USB performance? Could I be in problems here, or should it be doable??

The next few days this server will be banned (since it was in the living room floor - and it is a 1U rack server that is NOISY)... But now the wife is back, so I suspect it needs to go in to the server room rack before further playing..


-Tony