In my Hyper-V presentation on Wednesday, I said that USB support was one of the things that is missing from Hyper-V. That is correct – i.e. there is no ability to add USB devices as virtual hardware – but, in a conversation yesterday, Clive Watson pointed out that if you connect to a virtual machine using RDP, there is the ability to access local resources – including hard drives and smart card readers.

The way to do this is to use the Local Resources tab in the Remote Desktop Connection client options, where local devices and resources may be specified for connection:

If you click more, there is the option to select smart cards, serial ports, drives and supported plug and play devices (i.e. those that support redirection). In this case, I selected the USB hard drive that was currently plugged into my computer:

And when I connect to the virtual machine using RDP, it is listed the drive as driveletter on localmachine:

This is really a Terminal Services (presentation virtualisation) feature – rather than something in Hyper-V – and so it is true to say that there is no USB device support in Hyper-V for other access methods (e.g. from a virtual machine console) and that the RDP connection method is a workaround for occasional access. Microsoft see USB support as a desktop virtualisation feature and the only way that will change is if they see enough customer feedback to tell them that it’s something we need on servers too.