The Lantronix device will install a device driver to the PC that creates a virtual com port. LabVIEW will communicate with that com port (Let's say Com8) through VISA. The device driver will handle the communication with the Lantronix device over the network.
The Lantronix device I used is pretty sophisticated, and was not that easy to set up. It may also have other methods of communication such as talking to it TCP/IP. If I remember correctly, it also had a local terminal mode and a remote terminal mode.
In the end, once I figured out the trick to getting the device driver to work (the instructions were just not that obvious on how you had to set up the ports and open up the firewall to make it work), I was able to use it just like I said at the beginning as a Virtual com port. I've used other remote serial devices that were truly much more plug and play.
