USB printer passthrough XenServer

Question

Heey Guys,

In our network we have two printers. One of these printers is Wifi enabled and can be used all over the network. The other one is USB-only and is connected to the central server. Our central server is running Citrix XenServer 5.5.

The second printer needs to be connected to the network. The central server is having a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine running, with Active Directory. I need to pass the USB connection to the Win2k8 virtual machine. Is there a way to do this? Could this be done using some commands via SSH? There must be some way to do so...

Hope you guys can help :D. Thanks in advance.

Greetings, Robert

Answer 1

I have fixed this issue using "USB over Network", from www.usb-over-network.com. You can easily download the server, install it to the XenServer and then install the client to your VM so you can share the USB devices connected to your physical server to your virtual server.

This works with almost all devices you can imagine. I have even tried to use a webcam and this worked flawless!

This issue is solved :-)

Answer 2

Later versions of Citrix seem to have dramatically fewer print problems than versions of the past. I’d say that anyone running XenServer 6 or newer will probably be ok utilizing the built in features for Citrix printing. If you are running a version of Citrix older that 6 and it seems that you are, you might want to consider using a 3rd party print software package like Tricerat Screwdrivers. Screwdrivers allows you to completely turn off Citrix printing features from within XenServer, and rely completely on the third party tool for all printing activities.