As you may already know, Hyper-V does not allow you to connect physical COM ports to child virtual machines. This poses a problem for many people who want to virtualize servers with legacy devices connected via RS-232. There are different hardware and/or software solutions available, but ultimately they all require that you make your COM ports available over a network connection. Your main options are to share/redirect a COM port from a physical machine to a virtual machine, or to use a hardware adapter to connect the RS-232 device directly to the network.

For our legacy application, I chose to go with a hardware adapter. We purchased the StarTech 1 Port RS-232/422/485 Serial over IP adapter. I was very eager to get this adapter because it would allow us to virtualize an old server that was still relying on a directly connected serial device. I chose to go with an adapter so we could have flexibility and not need to rely on a single server to do some sort of sharing or redirecting of a COM port.

After we received the adapter I was a little disappointed. Continue reading Hyper-V, COM ports, and the StarTech NETRS2321E →