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I would like to stream music to my Ventrilo server from a Windows XP virtual machine running on an ESXi host.

I have followed the instructions outlined here to stream music from something like VLC to the Ventrilo server on another machine and it works fine.

I have also added the lines: 

sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
sound.fileName = "-1"
sound.autodetect = "TRUE"

to my .vmx file, as suggested here, to get a sound card in my VM.

The problem I am having is that it seems that my VM is not outputting any sound, so there's nothing to stream through Ventrilo. The Device Manager on the VM shows that this new sound card has drivers and doesn't appear to have any concerns with it.

Can someone point me in the right direction to get my desired outcome?

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4 Answers 4

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Another solution is:

Host <> Virtual Audio Cable <> Ventrilo

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I installed Virtual Audio cable 4.10 on my Windows 2000 Guest OS running on ESXi. I works no problem. As a small test I used Speak freely and was able to broadcast audio. I then tested remote control and that worked like a charm after I enabled Voice over IP.

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If you read through the entire thread that you have linked, you will see that there is no working solution. ESXi is meant for server virtualization where sound is not an issue. There is no way to get virtual audio directly on an ESXi client.

If you are working on the VM, you can get the audio through RDP, but this doesn't help you. Unfortunately it looks like you're out of luck.

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  • I guess that makes sense. But it just seems like the driver should be able to take the audio from VLC or similar and pump it out to Ventrilo without having to worry about whether or not it's going to be "heard" by an audio device on the machine itself. After all, I can stream movies from that VM through VLC over the Internet without issue.
    – omghai2u
    Commented Jun 7, 2010 at 4:09
  • @omghai2u - those are two different tasks. To "pump" the audio to a remote server you would have to process it on the local machine, which is impossible in ESXi. Hosting video to stream via VLC is totally different. In that case, the server hosts the files and provides a way for the client to connect and stream the files. The audio and video processing are done on the client.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Jun 7, 2010 at 13:34
  • @MarkM: I see what you're saying; I just don't see why it's impossible to do on the VM or how it's very different from my movie scenario. It doesn't need to output the sound to an actual device (which, I can clearly see would be impossible), it just needs to take an audio stream (from a file) and send it to the listening client (ventrilo) running on the same machine. Having only written a few drivers for Windows myself, this seems doable. I just don't get why it would require something special to move one audio buffer to an awaiting client that's expecting an audio buffer.
    – omghai2u
    Commented Jun 8, 2010 at 5:59
  • @omhhai2u - It's because there is no audio device to write the driver for.
    – MDMarra
    Commented Jun 8, 2010 at 10:45
  • Just wanted to update that, after much hard word, I did write the driver I outlined here and it works wonderfully. Too bad it was apparently impossible.
    – omghai2u
    Commented Jan 3, 2011 at 10:34
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I believe the only working solution for this under ESXi to actually attach your sound device to the VM using VMDirectPath. Of course, this probably won't work for you since it requires your CPU and motherboard to support VT-d. Only Intel Nehalem chips (Xeon 5500) and newer Core i5 (Core i5-650/660/670/680) and some Core i7 have support for this, but it lets you attach a PCIe device (or all your PCI devices behind a PCIe-PCI bridge) directly to a VM.

I run ESXi on a Core i5 Lenovo ThinkServer TS200v and the onboard Intel HD Audio works great attached to a Windows VM.

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