An open letter to Microsoft’s Hyper-V Team about USB

Dear Hyper-V Team and Program Manager,

First, let me commend you on what is a great job overall with Hyper-V. It’s a lean, mean, hosting machine and runs 2008R2 VMs flawlessly. It also does a bang-up job with 2008 and 2003R2 guests as well, but I like to run the latest and the greatest when I can, so 2008R2 is what I can speak to the most. I wasn’t sure how I would like it sitting on top of a full Windows O/S, but after four months of running it on the same hardware that I had ESXi running on, with the same guest load, all I can say is ‘wow.’ It really kicks arse!

If only all such letters were strictly full of praise, the world would be a better place. Sorry, but I can’t go there yet. See, here’s the thing. You kinda screwed the pooch when you decided not to have USB support in Hyper-V. I don’t mean full support for USB speakers, network adapters, scanners, lava lamps and coffee warmers; I just need drive support. It’s there in Virtual Server, Virtual Workstation, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, and even in VirtualBox, so it’s not like it can’t be done. And yes, you’re absolutely right in pointing out that it is not in ESX either..but I was hoping you would want to distinguish how you’re better than ESX, not how you’re the same.

I’ve read a lot of posts this morning from people pleading for USB support, with a lot of responses from so-called MVPs questioning the reasoning, as if such a request is patently ridiculous. Frankly, that is offensive, and short-sighted, considering…

• how many customers are asking for it (521K hits searching Google for "hyper-v usb support,) and
• how many perfectly legitimate uses there would be for this, and
• the things that your own products require(or at the very least, are one step processes with a USB drive, and nearly impossible hacks without) you to use USB drives for, and finally
• that third party (expensive) software exists to emulate this function shows that SOMEBODY must want this.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out some of the reasons why adding USB support to Hyper-V would be a good thing, since I just ran head-on in to one of them, and which may require me to completely rebuild a solution on physical hardware since so far, I can’t find a way around this other than to skip a very important step in securing systems while ensuring business continuity and recoverability.

• Backups-tapes are expensive, slow, and require specialised hardware to use. USB drives are fast, cheap, and don’t care what kind of hardware is at the other end of your BCP/DR plan. They can be encrypted, easily transported, and are a little more rugged than tapes. While I wouldn’t say to entirely replace tapes for enterprise backups, I see USB drives used daily for backups by clients both large and small.
• Data transfers-Whether you are migrating data to a testing platform, secondary location, or a third party, USB drives don’t care what kind of infrastructure is at the far ends. Outsourced services use USB drives all the time between themselves and clients, mainly because the U stands for Universal. You might want to remember that.
• Seeding DFS-How to you set up a DFS replica with GB to TB sized collections when you only have a T1 between sites? It’s a common practice for seeding replication for large data stores involves USB drives. Copy all your data to a drive, ship it to your remote location, build the secondary data store, and then establish your synch.
• DCPROMO from media-Yes, you could always burn a CD for this, but that is not very green thinking, and there’s no hardware encryption available for optical media.
• Encryption Keys for MSFT’s own stuff-which leads us to the compelling event for this post. We’re trying to implement encryption in SharePoint (MOSS 2007) for application encryption strings…like it’s recommended by Microsoft as a best practice for security. Oh look, to do that, you have to export the key to USB media for safe keeping, which makes perfect sense until you realise you built your SharePoint servers on Hyper-V, which doesn’t support USB. GRRRRR! Same problem with Bitlocker…no USB, no key export, even when you enable escrow in AD.

So come on guys, it can’t be that hard to do if it works in Virtual Server. Distinguish your product from ESX by giving us basic USB support for external drives. Pretty please?

Thanks,
Ed

Speaking of lean, mean, virtual machines…here’s a clip to show there’s no hard feelings. Be honest, doesn’t Sgt. Hulka remind you of the System/390 sysadmin you used to work with? Doesn’t Francis remind you of the Oracle DBA you’re working with right now?

What do you think? Does Hyper-V need/deserve USB drive support? Pretend this is a petition and leave a comment if you agree that it does!

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Tagged as: rants, virtualisation