Request: please give unique USB IDs to ZWA2 and ZBT2 to avoid passthrough conflicts

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Hello everyone. I am running both a Z Wave stick and a Zigbee and Thread stick (ZWA2 and ZBT2) in a VM on Unraid, and they share the same USB Vendor and Product ID (303a:4001). The only difference I can see is the USB product name string that shows up in lsusb, such as “Nabu Casa ZWA2” and “Nabu Casa ZBT2.” This makes it easy to tell them apart when the host OS owns the devices, but when I passthrough to a VM using libvirt, the VM XML configuration requires identifying devices by the bus number and device number.

The bus and device numbers are assigned each time the host boots and may change when the host re enumerates USB. As a result, each reboot can cause the passthrough entries to point to the wrong adapter. I do not see a reliable way to map devices by the product name string inside libvirt.

Would Nabu Casa consider using different Product IDs for ZWA2 and ZBT2 in a future hardware revision or firmware release? The same Vendor ID is fine, but unique Product IDs would make it much easier to passthrough both adapters to a virtual machine without USB remapping problems after a reboot. This would benefit users who run Home Assistant environments in virtual machines or who keep both adapters connected on the same system.

Thank you for considering this request.

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Hi, developers (also the hardware team I suppose) do not look at feature requests here. The requests have moved to github discussions, where they are categorized, labeled and voted for. So you’d be wise to post your request there.

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Missed that one. Good that FR are being structured :+1:

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I use a USB plugin on unraid that lets you pick USB devices and assign it to a VM. I had to install it because I use to have a zwave and ZigBee devices that used the th same chips as far as unraid was concerned.

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Just for the record, Proxmox does not have this problem. I am running Home Assistant within a Proxmox VM, and I have both a ZBT-2 and a ZWA-2 plugged in. Proxmox passes both devices through to the Home Assistant VM, which sees them correctly. This is a nice feature of Proxmox, which offers a variety of ways to pass through USB devices to its containers and VM’s.

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You should be able to mitigate this happening by using /dev/serial/by-id in the config for the Zwave & Zigbee integration itself. Both integration pages show you how to do it.

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