I had a bit of a disaster the other week.  My file server of 12 years vintage finally died, taking the RAIDed disks with it.

So I took the plunge and decided to go Virtual.  I purchased a server with an AMD Phenom 9650 quad core processor and 8GB of RAM from the very nice lady at Vivatech.

After installing Windows 2008 and Hyper-V on the bare metal and then introduced the Virtual machines, Domain Controller, a file server and Windows 7.  I was hoping theat Windows 2008 R2 was going to introduce USB support just like VMWare.  I was disappointed.

So I had to come up with another solution as I had a printer, scanner, camera, and iPod to connect to my network.  All USB devices.  Then I remembered I purchased a Belkin Network USB hub for my daughter and her husband for Christmas so that they did not have printer cables trailing over the floor from their laptop to their printer as they had a three year old child running around. Health and Safety rules OK !

So I took a punt and purchased one for myself.  I installed the software on my Windows 7 Image and plugged in the hub, plugged the printer into the hub and held my breath.  I need not have worried as up came the printer on the Network USB Hub Control Centre.  I connected to it and successfully printed a test page.  Buoyed by this success I plugged in my iPod and to my surprise iTunes started ! I then connected my printer and my scanner into the hub and both were recognised.  The only fly in the ointment is is that currently Epson do not do a 64 bit driver for my Perfection 1650 scanner.

However, I now have a solution to my problem of connecting my USB devices to a Hyper-V virtual machine.