There was another interesting question that I saw recently asking whether you can use a USB device for an ESXi Datastore while still maintaining the ability to passthrough other USB devices to a VM? This was interesting because my understanding was that you had to choose between one of the two options because ESXi required the USB Arbitrator service to be disabled for USB storage (not officially supported by VMware) and thus disabling USB passthrough for all of your VMs.
I decided to reach out to our USB expert within VMware Engineering, Songtao, who you may know as developer for the popular USB Network Native Driver for ESXi and the Community Networking Driver for ESXi Fling for this thoughts on this question. It turns out my assumption has actually been incorrect and there is actually a way to easily exclude specific USB devices from VM passthrough which can then be used by ESXi.
