Basic Operation

Historically “Terminal Services/Citrix” only supported specific classes of USB devices (audio, printers, smart-card, mass storage). Everything else was not support. The terminal server had specific generic device drivers for each class and mapped the remote USB peripheral to the appropriate driver.

With the new generic USB redirection, a bi-directional “pipe” is established between the peripheral and corresponding
3^rd party or generic driver on the server. Apart from maintaining the pipe, the terminal is not directly involved.

In theory all USBs device is supported by this new method.

Advantages

The two main benefits are:

1 - There is no device management by the thin client. Device driver is simply installed at RDP/ICA server.

2 - This method is used to manage devices that until now were not supported: ie webcams and scanners.

Microsoft recommend only using this method on local area network. (To avoid potential latency issues)

Supported Systems

Firmware version 1236c is required.

Configuration Principle

First define the 'Eligible Peripherals”. They can be defined by: 
 - type or class: for example, storage device, video device ... 
 - their unique ID (vendor ID and product ID).

USB redirection must then be activated for each RDP/ICA session.

In use

There are three options:
 1/ Devices automatically connected when the user logs into the server
 2/ The user is prompted to confirm or deny each peripheral when logging in
 3/ The device is not automatically connected when the user logs in

Whilst using the RDP session at any time the user can start or stop the redirection for a particular device.

A video (in English) is available. It shows the configuration and use of redirection USB ports with an RDP session.

To view this video click here.