Thought I’d post here as it’s relevant to my issue (well, according to Google 
).
I’ve bought a Sky Connect and although I was building out a second instance of HA on an RPi to connect to it, I ran into unrelated issues, so I thought I’d see if I could connect it to my main HA instance (hosted on ESXi 7.0).
The Sky Connect wouldn’t show up in HA.
My VMware admin days are long behind me and I forgot that I needed to add the device to the guest OS. When going into the VM settings, even though the VM was powered off, the Add other device > USB device option was greyed out.
I’d checked the ESX host that it was connected:
[root@esx1:~] esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list
Bus Dev VendorId ProductId Enabled Can Connect to VM Name
--- --- -------- --------- ------- --------------------------------- ----
1 2 10c4 ea60 true no (usbarbitrator is not running) Silicon Labs CP210x UART Bridge
As can be seen from the output of the esxcli command, the USB arbitrator service was not running.
To start:
[root@esx1:~] /etc/init.d/usbarbitrator start
And to make sure it stays running, even after a reboot:
[root@esx1:~] chkconfig usbarbitrator on
Now, running the esxcli command again:
[root@esx1:~] esxcli hardware usb passthrough device list
Bus Dev VendorId ProductId Enabled Can Connect to VM Name
--- --- -------- --------- ------- ----------------- ----
1 2 10c4 ea60 true yes Silicon Labs CP210x UART Bridge
And in the UI, the Add other device > USB device option was no longer greyed out:
The Silcon SkyConnect v1.0 device is connected:
And in HA:
Job done.
HTH.