Remoting devices into a Hyper-V child (virtual machine)

I have answered many questions about this in the forums, but I keep forgetting to document it. It took my wife asking me how to remote her Smart Card into a Hyper-V VM this morning that caused me to think about it again.

If you are using Hyper-V, you have already discovered that there is no support for remoting local devices into a Hyper-V VM. This is by design.

Hyper-V is an enterprise level hypervisor, like ESX, like XenServer, like VirtualIron, etc. None of those platforms support remoting devices either.

To guarantee a division between the parent and the children (host and its VMs) this separation must be maintained.

You may have also figured out that the Hyper-V console uses remote desktop protocol (RDP) to present the VM desktop. It does this by the host actually proxying the desktop from the VMs virtual video card. No different than ESX or XenServer using VNC under the covers. However, this limits you to network based resources and keyboard and mouse.

You, of course, want more.

It is really pretty simple, you simply use the Remote Desktop Client (RDC) to remote directly into your VM (don’t use the Hyper-V VM console client).


First, you must tweak your RDC connection.

1. Open the Remote Desktop Client (this must be version 6.1 or higher).

2. Select the Options button (the one with the arrows showing you that there is More to it).

3. Select the Local Resources TAB

4. Select More



5. Now, choose those devices that you want to remote into your VM.



In my case I have Smart Cards and PnP devices selected.

But I could also choose drives, serial ports, etc. Expand the trees, look around.

Now, this will only work with the Remote Desktop Client, not the Remote Desktops Client (did you notice the ‘s’ ?).


And - this is very important - you must successfully log in to the remote VM after adding these settings, or else the settings changes are lost.

Okay, back to the previous thought..

Remote Desktops is for management, Remote Desktop is for remoting the user experience, they are different animals.

So, for all you testers, developers, people with Hyper-V on your laptops, etc. Here you go. You can have your Hyper-V and your weird devices too.

Oh, another caveat - if you RDP into a Windows Server 2008 box (machine or VM) using RDP and you want to take all your neat-o cool devices in with you - you need to enable the Desktop Experience feature on the Server 2008 box (machine or VM). This is what installs all the support for all the neat-o cool things that we all enjoy on our desktops.