How to share files between a Hyper-V host and its virtual machines

If you've used Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Virtual Server, you'll have enjoyed the fact that you can copy and paste between a virtual machine and those platforms. This doesn’t work with Hyper-V however—you can't copy/paste between a VM and the Hyper-V host.

The workaround is to do the following:

1. On your Hyper-V host, create a shared folder and assign Change permission to Everyone.

2. On the virtual machine running on the host, open the Network and Sharing Center and enable File and Printer Sharing.

3. On the virtual machine, click Start and type \\host_name\share_name where host_name is the name of your Hyper-V host and share_name is the name of the share you created.

4. Press ENTER and an Explorer window will open in the VM showing the contents of the shared folder on the host.

5. You can now copy files from the VM to the host and vice versa as needed.

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8 thoughts on “How to share files between a Hyper-V host and its virtual machines”

  1. Another method is adding your VM to the same Workgroup name as your Local Host machine. Or Domain if you have one setup!

    1. Unfortunately, it’s not enough for VM and Local to be joined to the same Workgroup. Microsoft doesn’t provide any kind of support for this issue.

  2. Small note: this will not work if your host and VMs are located in different networks, i.e. in different VLANs. There’s a plenty of reasons for such isolation in production environments.

  3. This is not a workaround. This is messing with the network setup which may break stuff that is already configured appropriately.

  4. Neither will these instructions work if the VM is a Linux distro. There is NO Network and Sharing Center in Linux.

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