It's been awhile since I used ESXi but for awhile I was running an ESXi6 server and I'd connect to a VM on the server from my linux desktop with VMware Player (I believe you officially needed workstation to do this but there was a command line backdoor). Then in the client there was a redirect USB device option.
I do the same thing now with qemu/kvm server. I just fire up virt-manager, open the VM I want to use and pick redirect USB device from the menu. Then I can select a local USB device and send it through. I haven't used it for much besides flash drives though. It requires a couple tweaks to the VM settings and I think it needs spice tools but that's expected, VMware needed VMware tools for this as well.
I do the same thing now with qemu/kvm server. I just fire up virt-manager, open the VM I want to use and pick redirect USB device from the menu. Then I can select a local USB device and send it through. I haven't used it for much besides flash drives though. It requires a couple tweaks to the VM settings and I think it needs spice tools but that's expected, VMware needed VMware tools for this as well.