Hyper-V USB Passthrough Guide
If you’re interested in virtualization technologies, you’ve heard of Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a hypervisor (virtualization software) that lets run multiple operating systems on the same physical machine. Every guest OS created with the help of Hyper-V platform gets direct access to the hardware of a physical server (hard drive, memory, processor, etc.) Hyper-V virtualization environment is compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems.
With that, probably the most inconvenient thing about Hyper-V platform for me as well as for many other users is that the virtualization software does not provide USB pass-through support out of the box. Simply put, you cannot access USB peripherals attached to a local PC while working in Hyper-V virtual machine. To resolve this challenge, you need to either resort to help of some dedicated third-party tools or look for a workaround among features of your host OS.
In this article we will consider two different ways of forwarding USB devices from a host PC to a Hyper-V virtual machine and compare the pros and cons of each method.
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Let’s say you have Hyper-V OS installed on your PC. Working in the virtual machine, you realize that a USB dongle plugged into the host computer is not accessible from the guest operating system. You don’t necessarily care how to redirect USB over the network. You just want to connect USB device to Hyper-V VM as though it were connected to the virtual machine physically.
