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I'm trying to create a simple Hyper-V test machine, and am having more problems than expected with the basic networking.

All other hypervisors I've used (vmware server, vmware player, virtualbox) allow me to use the default single NIC in my machine, and then create guests with "bridged" mode so they appear like a normal machine on the network.

With the Hyper-V server, when I create a Virtual Switch and set it to "external", I lose all network access from the host.

  1. I create a new virtual switch called "vSwitch External"
  2. I select external and allow management...
  3. After I close that dialog, my physical NIC has all items disabled apart from "Hyper-V Extensible Virtual Switch"
  4. A new NIC appears called "vEthernet (vSwitch external)" with all the usual items enabled
  5. There is no network access from the host to the outside

Is it really that complex to get a simple, single-NIC Hyper-V server going, in such a way that I can still use the host? Or is there some problem stopping my networking working correctly? As I see little mention of this problem when searching, I'm guessing the latter.

The host is Windows 8.

Removing and re-adding the vSwitch with reboots between each attempt seems to have worked, to the degree that my host machine can access the rest of the network now. Neither NIC has the Hyper-V extensible switch service enabled on it now.

A problem remains, however, in that the guests cannot access any network. I've only tried Ubuntu Server guests so far, and they detect the interfaces okay, but cannot get any access to the network, either with DHCP or static interfaces.

(Incidentally, to the four people that close-voted this question, wouldn't it be polite to comment why? This is supposed to be an educational forum, after all. The question does seem to relate to servers and networking.)

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When you're creating your Virtual Switch are you selecting the checkbox for "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter"? – joeqwerty Nov 11 '12 at 16:48
Yes, I've tried it with and without that. Not sure if it means anything, but I can't enable IP4 on the NIC after Hyper-V 'grabs' it. – Cylindric Nov 11 '12 at 16:49
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Right, because Hyper-V creates a virtual network adapter that TCP (and other network components) are bound to and the Microsoft Virtual Network Switch driver gets bound to the physical adapter. This is normal and is what you want. You should not try to bind any component to the physical adapter after creating a Virtual Switch on that physical adapter. – joeqwerty Nov 11 '12 at 16:54
Are the TCPv4 properties (ip address, etc.) correct on the virtual network adapter after you create the virtual switch? – joeqwerty Nov 11 '12 at 16:55
In addition, the article you linked to isn't relevant to what you're doing. You're not setting up a single NIC to be used by Hyper-V for connectivity to multiple subnets (which is why RRAS would be needed). – joeqwerty Nov 11 '12 at 16:59
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closed as off topic by Greg Askew, Michael Hampton, Adrian, John Gardeniers, RobM Nov 17 '12 at 13:16

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