I looked at and implemented the following documentation: http://wiki.openvz.org/USB_Printing_in_VE and was able to see the usb device in my container with # lsusb but that was about it, I could not mount the device inside my container or see it with the fdisk -l command. Perhaps there is something I am missing?
After a little research I came upon this: http://wiki.openvz.org/Bind_mounts in which you mount the drive in the HE and and then bind mount the drive in your VE (openVZ container) and this works.
I must admit this is not the most elegant solution. Is there a better way to mount a usb device in an openVZ container? It would be a nice feature to have this automated in the the proxmox-ve gui.