I'm hoping some of the IT cognoscenti here can help me out with this.

I run a Windows 2008 R2 server at my dad's dental office. The physical server runs two virtual machines (in Hyper V) and nothing else. One of the virtual machines needs to run a server for a dental imaging software that requires a hardware USB key for licensing purposes. As far as I can tell, Hyper V doesn't allow VMs to access devices plugged into the hardware USB ports on the host machine.

First, is this correct, or am I missing something?

Second, if it is correct, I think I need some sort of network USB device so the software can access its licensing key. Correct? But there really doesn't seem to be much out there like this - just a lot of discontinued products and one device (www.digi.com) that is incredibly expensive ($287).

Any ideas? I can't be the only one out there who has run into this.

Thanks!

You're not the only one. Google something like Hyper-V USB dongle and you will find a number of people grappling with the same issue. Dongles are a nuisance and I hope virtualization forces them to go away.

As for solutions, there are USB-over-ethernet solutions available, such as KernelPro: http://www.kernelpro.com/usb-over-ethernet.html

Thanks. That software looked promising, but it kept disconnecting me. I wound up installing the barebones drivers for the dongle on the physical server, which works fine. I'd prefer it were all in a VM, but what can you do.

Thanks for the idea though!

That's just one package. There are more out there if you look for them. Not sure what would cause it to keep disconnecting you, but perhaps another product will work better in your environment if you're still intent on getting it all virtualized.