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Hyper-V Smart Card Reader

J

J-Will

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 10, 2009
Messages
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Is there a way to share a smart card reader through Hyper-V, so that one of the guest VMs can have access to the hardware? Using the Hyper-V manager I cannot seem to find a way to accomplish this. The hardware is a PCMCIA device that reads CACs. I want to setup a guest VM of Vista and allow the guest to login to Active Directory through the CAC credentials.

Does Hyper-V allow the sharing of PCMCIA devices or even USB? I understand that the device would be locked to that specific VM.
 
I'm still new to Hyper-V but no where have I found a feature that lets you share a usb drive with a VM. If they did, my work would be a lot easier. For now, they only let you mount dvd/cd into the VM's. Let me know if you find something.
 
VMWare workstation allows connection to USB devices, also some Virtualbox versions support USB devices.

VMWare ESX and Hyper-V do not as the hardware would need to be in place on every host server in exactly the same configuration for it to work properly with more advanced features like live migration (not out in non-Beta form for Hyper-V yet).

If you are eventually looking to do things like live migrations of you VMs, and allow for usage of USB items, you may want to look at hardware software combination's for allowing network connections to USB devices.

Software runs on the client machine (virtual guest) allowing a TCP/IP connection to a specialized device that allows TCP/IP based communications with USB hardware, or a specific computer also running software to make its USB ports available remotely. utilizing a solution like this allows the guest OS to maintain connection to remote devices without a host based configuration dependency as it migrates from host to host.

I'm not aware of any similar products for PCMCIA, but they may exist.
 
When I installed any of the VMs, I used built in dvd drive. It locked the drive to that particular VM. Cant a PCMCIA or USB device use the same methodology?
 
J-Will said:
When I installed any of the VMs, I used built in dvd drive. It locked the drive to that particular VM. Cant a PCMCIA or USB device use the same methodology?
Click to expand...

Yes, if the virtualization software is written to support it. I listed two pieces of virtualization software that do support USB device access in such a manner in my previous post. PCMCIA is a very specialized case. I'm not aware of any virtualization software that virtualizes access to a PCMCIA port.

Hyper-V and VMWare ESX support very moving virtual machines (Hyper-V only in BETA at this point) from host to host without taking the guest OS off-line. To support this functionality, you'd have to move the PCMCIA/USB hardware physically from one host to another simultaneously with the guest OS move. Not feasible, so they didn't even program for it.

Simultaneously moving a TCP/IP connection from one host to another simultaneously to the VM move, very feasible since you have to do that to move the VM in the first place. Hence TCP/IP to USB solutions for virtualization.
 
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