Mounting USB drive within 2012 R2 Hyper-V Guest

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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • Then under Local devices and resources, click More…
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  • Then click to expand Drives
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  • Locate and click (to select/check) your USB drive
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  • Now, if you open up This PC, you should find your USB drive is now mounted as a mapped drive for you to access!
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