Donglify is a software application that is extremely useful when faced with the challenge of how to share a dongle USB key with multiple remote computers.
Olga Weis
• Another situation that you may face is attempting to access a USB security key that is connected to a physical host from a virtual machine. In this case, a dedicated dongle splitter app can help you share your security dongle over the network and redirect it to your guest OS.
Donglify is a software application that is extremely useful when faced with the challenge of how to share a dongle USB key with multiple remote computers.
With the easy and secure connectivity and the multi-connect feature, Donglify is beyond all doubt a very handy and user-friendly app. And now that you know how to share a USB dongle over the network, let's talk about Donglify’s pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
There is another solution you can use for sharing a USB dongle over the network: a hub. It’s a hardware device, and thus understandably has some limitations as to the number of dongles you can plug into it, and how many machines can access a dongle at every instant. Plus, you only can use this option if you have physical access to your dongle. By way of example, let’s take a closer look at Smart Logic’s USB dongle sharing hubs:
SmarterX-USB. It’a a wired dongle sharing hub, so you won’t be able to use it on a remote PC if it’s more than 5 meters away. There are two versions of it — with 3 and 5 USB ports. Both are compatible with every type of dongle on the market and work with Mac OS and OS Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10. The ceiling amount of users you can share your dongle with through this hub is 5.
SmarterX-NET. It’s a USB dongle sharing hub that works as a USB dongle server. You plug it into your LAN switch, and every dongle connected to it becomes instantly accessible from all networked machines in your office. This eliminates the need to physically attach the dongle to each user’s machine for them to see it just as if it was plugged into their computer directly. The maximum number of remote PCs that can connect to a dongle in parallel is 6.
The bottom line
When sharing a USB dongle over the network with a dongle sharing hub, you are physically limited by the hardware in terms of how many dongles you can insert. There is also a limit to how many connections can be made concurrently to the physical dongle. You also, of course, need to have access to the physical dongle.
Using a software solution like Donglify overcomes these restrictions. Donglify’s multi-connect feature allows multiple simultaneous connections while keeping the physical dongle safe and secure in one known location.
Unlike USB dongle sharing hubs, Donglify also offers additional benefits in terms of how you make your USB accessible:
