Accessing physical Host COM port within Hyper-V VM

Question

I have just virtualized a physical machine running Windows XP Pro SP3. The physical machine it was copied from is running a piece of critical software needed for day-day operation and security.

This software communicates with a separate device through an DB-9 RS232 serial port (COM1).

I need the newly created VM to be able to communicate with the same device over a physical serial port on the host server (server 2012 R2). I am using Hyper-V as the Hypervisor for the VM. I can see that setting up virtual COM ports is possible in the settings for the VM, but from my research into the subject it seems that directly mapping a virtual COM port to a physical one is not possible within Hyper-V without using 3rd party software.

My question is this: how do I allow my virtual machine to access the physical serial port of the host machine through Hyper-V, and if I can not do this through Hyper-V, which hypervisor will allow me to do this?

Solution

I found the answer to this question in this blog post here http://www.goodjobsucking.com/?p=214

using a program called com0com http://com0com.sourceforge.net/ you can set up a virtual COM port through the network that connects to the physical COM port on the host machine.

follow the instructions in the blog post to get this set up.

Comments

[Greg Askew]

Device passthrough wasn't added until Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V. Not sure if that would work with standard COM ports though. This really isn't a good forum for dead end hardware/platforms/applications.

[Carlos Garcia]

It seems the MV is important enough to invest some money into a good solution. There's some "Serial over Ethernet" solutions, that will allow you to have "High-Availability" and more good features in the Hyper-V environmet.