Welcome to the user community.
The answer is (as usual), it depends...
My experience has been the following:
If your printer/scanner is usb based, there's a reasonable chance it will work.
I have an old HP Scanjet (USB) and an old Belkin UPS (USB) that both require drivers and software that only work in XP. I have an XP VM that I run each device's drivers and software in and everything works.
I also have an old HP LasetJet (parallel port) that isn't supported directly by Windows 7 and greater. For this I used a USB->Parallel converter and from within an XP VM, I'm able to access and print to it. A Linux VM also recognizes the printer via the serial->parallel adapter and I can print to it as well.
In all cases, I only install the drivers in the VM, not on the host. Actually I can't install the drivers on the host even if I wanted to, they are blocked from even installing in Win 7 and in particular Win 7 - 64bit host.
If your hardware requires a custom board plugged in to the motherboard (like SCSI controllers used in early scanners), chances are pretty good that it won't work as Workstation doesn't do pass-through for PCI (or any other) device.
I've had mostly good luck with USB devices. (Not all, but most).
You'll probably just have to try it and see..
Good luck.
