Let’s say you have an external USB drive, and you need to transfer some files from it to a guest partition running on your Hyper-V 2012 R2 server. What do you do? Well, one solution is to make use of a feature in Windows 2012 Hyper-V called “Enhanced Session Mode Policy”.
So let’s get started!
Preliminary
- Before proceeding, go ahead and connect your external USB drive to your physical server.
Enabling Enhanced Session Mode
- Open up Hyper-V Manager from the host parent) server.
- Right click on the host server, then click Hyper-V Settings
- Take a look at the Hyper-V Settings window. On the left frame are two sections labeled: Server and User
- Under the Server section, locate and click on Enhanced Session Mode Policy
- In the right frame, click (to check) Allow enhanced session mode
- Back in the left frame, under User, locate and click Enhanced Session Mode
- In the right frame, verify that Use enhanced session mode is checked
- Click Apply and OK
Start guest VM and connect USB
- Now, click to connect/start your VM session and login
- After logging in, a new screen will display labeled: Display configuration
- Click on Show Options from the lower left corner
- Then under Local devices and resources, click More…
- Then click to expand Drives
- Locate and click (to select/check) your USB drive
- Now, if you open up This PC, you should find your USB drive is now mounted as a mapped drive for you to access!