Many of you will know that I’ve been a big proponent of the Fabulatech USB over Ethernet software specifically for use with the Microsoft Hyper-V environments. I’ve spoken very highly of their product and how we use it in our client environments. Well I’m sorry to say that has changed. We are now testing an alternate product to suit this requirement called KernelPro. So far our tests have shown this product and vendor to be superior in all the ways that the Fabulatech product has failed us.
So how has the Fabulatech product failed us? Where do I start.
How about BSOD on the Hyper-V host? Install the product, and reboot. The Hyper-V host BSODs and you can’t get out of it. Your only choice is to go into Last Known Good Configuration and try to remove the product… whats’ that the product says it’s removed but now is still there? Ok – let’s ask Fabulatech support… yes – we did that… over 2 weeks ago, provided the memory.dmp file. That was on the 4th Feb – their response was “we don’t have anyone that can analyse that until 8th Feb.” Ok – not ideal but we wait. We’ve sent a number of followup emails from them since then and are as at today – 12 days after sending them the memory.dmp still waiting on a response.
How about random lockups of the Hyper-V host? Again something we’ve seen. Fabulatech’s response “we’ll fix it eventually…” They are not taking into account that we’ve purchased their product to solve business problems and those business problems need to be solved now, not “eventually”.
Let’s try their Serial over Ethernet with Serial Fax Modems then… only to find out that it’s not working. The product has gone past the 30 day eval, so we’ve had to pay for it. Fabulatech has again been involved in investigating the problem… I believe for 3 months now. So we’ve decided to ask for a refund so that we can at least install another product. Fabulatech’s response is “We don’t provide refunds, we provide the evaluation period for you to try the product which you have then purchased. We will fix the product eventually”
So the problem for us here, is not just a failure of the product, but a failure of the organisation to understand the business requirements of our customers and respond in an appropriate time. We have gone through all the correct channels to obtain support and help, but to no avail. I can therefore only decide to no longer use their product and also to advise others of my decision to change so that they too might not have the same problems. I’m keen to hear more about your experiences with this product too.
Thanks for the KernalPro link. We to have had issues with Fabulatech usb over network product. We found the product would lockup the USB hardware on the hyperv host, and we could not use any usb hardware, shared or excluded in usb over network. We tried disabling the services, and killing the processes but this didn’t fix. The host had to be restarted, or the product uninstalled.
We have choosen to share a drive on the host, and backup to a network location from the guest o/s. Works perfect thus far, and enables multiple guests to backup to the same drive.
I am finding it very difficult to set up. I have two computers connected by crossover cable, but they can’t seem to find one another using this software. Yet they find one another easily just using Windows networking.
I had an almost identical bad experience with Fabulatech, including the BSOD on a test Hyper-V host. The company was similarly unresponsive.
I have been using USB Redirector by Incentives Pro for almost a year in production. The RDP edition is especially nice because it communicates over a virtual circuit of an Remote Desktop Connection, which means no client/server IP address configuration, just share the device and done.
I understand now they have a new version that is more Terminal Server (Remote Desktop Services) friendly in that hardware shared over the RDP virtual circuit is only seen by the logged in user and not all users (as is normally the case with other products).
Same thing is happening to me…. after uninstalling this shit I cant access to my flash drives anymore… 🙁
It’s enormous that you are getting thoughts from this piece of writing as well as from our discussion made here.