Hyper-V Networking

Hello!

This past week, I experienced some trials and tribulations getting my networking straight on a new Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Core server and Hyper-V.  I found that, although there were many helpful articles out there, none were very direct about what happens when you assign a physical NIC to a virtual network via the Hyper-V manager.

Here are the findings I can confirm:

1.  It is a Microsoft best practice to utilize more than one physical NIC in a server, using one of them to allow remote management to the hosting Hyper-V server.  This one will be assigned the IP address of the host server.  After implementing this, I realized that this is the reason why, if you don't follow this, you can end up with virtual servers that cannot communicate with the host on the network.

2.  After you bind a physical adapter to the virtual network, the physical adapter becomes no longer available to the host Hyper-V OS.  Therefore, THERE IS NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT IP ADDRESSES OR NETWORKING FOR THE OTHER NICS!!!  They will allow DHCP to assign automatically, or treat your static IPs appropriately, but nothing is required on the physical adapter after this binding occurs.

3.  If for any reason you find that you must delete a virtual network from Hyper-V, you may find that the physical adapter has disappeared!  Not to worry!  Search and download nvspscrub.js and run that on your host to recover and unbind all physical adapters from Hyper-V.

That's all I've got for now.  Hope that helps!  Let me know if you have any questions.

Jose