Share USB drive between VM's?

Conan257 · 11 Sep 2013 at 16:37

I'm in the process of a home server upgrade and wondering if my USB drive will be accessible between multiple VMs...

Planning to run Hyper-V Core with 2-3 VM's on it. Main VM will be windows 8 box which will be a file server, but I'm looking to run other VMs for Linux etc.

My main storage drive, however, is currently a USB drive as I remove it often when going away, and would like this to be available to both VMs (and any future ones) for both read and write.

Should I set it up on the W8 box and share it to the network for the other VMs or is there a better way?

Caged · 11 Sep 2013 at 18:49

You'll have to share it over a network. Block storage (a USB disk) cannot be shared unless both systems are aware they are sharing it and have methods in place to handle this.

Conan257 · 11 Sep 2013 at 18:50

I think that'll do the job. I plan to have 2 drives mirrored eventually but for the moment it's primary on USB.

RichIbizaSport · 12 Sep 2013 at 16:32

There's a flaw in your plan. Hyper-V server doesn't support USB or USB pass through.

The only way around this would be to go with something like Server 2012 core (or full), install the hyper-v role, you can then network share the USB drive via windows server.

Conan257 · 12 Sep 2013 at 17:15

That puts a minor spanner in the works then!

Might install server 2012 or windows 8 then as the primary operating system, and use VMs for the other stuff I want to achieve....

Cheers!

Mr-White · 12 Sep 2013 at 19:28

What about a USB Anywhere device ?

MW