At TechEd in New Orleans, Microsoft has announced that the version of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 \u2013 a typical Microsoft mouthful \u2013 will include support for generic USB devices. That is, you can remote into a Hyper-V VM, plug in your USB camera, scanner or bar-code reader, and it will be re-directed to the remote desktop.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a welcome feature, and removes one of the annoyances of working on a remote desktop. However, there is another scenario that Microsoft has not addressed, which is support for USB devices on the Hyper-V host. For example, USB drives are often used for backup, but if you plug a USB drive into a Hyper-V host, it is not easy to use it for backup from within a Hyper-V guest. Well, there are ways, but you are not going to like any of them \u2013 mount the drive in the host, mark it as offline, attach it to the guest using pass-through, and so on.<\/p>\n
So will Hyper-V ever support USB devices in the host as well as on remote clients? I asked about this, and was told that it is not a priority, because although the topic comes up regularly, it is \u201cnot in the top ten feature requests\u201d.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a shame. Even if Microsoft supported only USB storage devices, it would help significantly with tasks like backing up Small Business Server when run on a virtual machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At TechEd in New Orleans, Microsoft has announced that the version of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 \u2013 a typical Microsoft mouthful \u2013 will include support for generic USB devices. That is, you can remote into a Hyper-V VM, plug in your USB camera, scanner or bar-code reader, and it will … Continue reading USB devices and Hyper-V \u2013 remote client yes, host no<\/span>