Kurt Shintaku's Blog

An account manager I work with asked me this question and I thought it’d be worth writing up:

Q: How do you use USB Smartcards with Client Hyper-V Virtual Machines?

THE BAD NEWS:
Hyper-V in general does NOT allow guest virtual machines to use host-connected USB devices.  In other words, if you:

1. Connect a USB SmartCard to a Win8 PC w/ Client Hyper-V enabled on it
2. Run Windows 7/8 in a Client Hyper-V Virtual Machine

…you can NOT use the USB SmartCard in the VM through the Virtual Machine Connection client.  Neither the Virtual Machine Connection client nor Client Hyper-V are able to recognize and take advantage of USB devices.

THE GOOD NEWS:
Now, however, if you:

1. Enable Remote Desktop for the Windows Client VM (Control Panel – System)
2. Connect to your VM over Remote Desktop Connection using the Remote Desktop Connection client installed on your desktop

…the RDP session will redirect the USB port to the Hyper-V Virtual Machine, enabling you to access your local desktop SmartCard through the VM session for access into systems like two-factor authentication VPN.

EXAMPLE:
Below is me using the Remote Desktop Connection client into my local Windows 8 Client Hyper-V-driven Windows 7 VM.  You can see the IT VPN client recognizes my locally installed SmartCard on my machine’s USB port.  (I keep a Windows 7 VM with Office 2010 & other apps running on my system for testing.)

(IMPORTANT: The Remote Desktop Connection client MUST be RemoteFX enabled.  Windows 8 inherently has this capability however if you connect to your Windows 8 Client Hyper-V host from a separate Windows 7 computer, it will need to be updated with an RemoteFX-enabled RDC client by installing the Remote Desktop Protocol 8.0 Update for Windows 7 SP1.)