How to configure Hyper-V network over RDP with a single NIC

I may not be an expert with HyperV but I do have a question - what were you configuring that caused the disconnect?  Were you trying to configure the guest VMs NICs or actually working on the Host NIC?  Stating the obvious, but any changes to the host NIC would cause a disconnect as it went about applying the changes.  Changes to the Guest VMs should not have affected the Host connection you had.  What type of network connection do you have between the Host and the Guests?  NAT, Bridged, etc?

In the Virtual Network Manager I had created an external External network with "Allow management operating system to share this network adapter" unchecked, which is where I may have gone wrong and lost the connection.

You need to be in front of the server to get this working again. You can try to setup Hyper-v Management on another system then try to reconfigure the network settings from here as well

You cannot do that over the network anymore. You need a physical access to the server.

The server has been completely re-installed.


All I've done so far is disable the IPv6, set the IPv4 to static and install the Hyper-V role.  Haven't yet added a Virtual Network or installed a host.  I wanted to get advice before I did anything this time around.

By "server" i mean the host server.

I dumped the whole host server and reinstalled 2K8 R2 Enterprise x64, then disabled IPv6, set the IPv4 adapter to static and installed the Hyper-V role.  Then I logged onto experts-exchange and posted this question.

Sorry thought you already had it setup and you lost connection to the Host.

The recommendation is to have multple network cards at least two.

Read this as well.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd744830.aspx

In that case you can add the Hyper-V role. Next, just make sure that you check “Allow management operating system to share this network adapter” when you create a virtual network adapter. That will allow you to share the adapter for managing the host and for the virtual machines.  

Yeah, 2 NIC cards definitely seems ideal, unfortunately I'm going to have to try to solve the problem with only one.  I'm going to give these resources a good read.

You should be able to run with one but you will lose network connection after making this change.

The mistake was to uncheck the box to share the NIC with the management operating system. When you install the virtual network, that will cause the host to see a new, different network adapter. That new adapter will have default settings so you need to have a DHCP server to give it an IP address or you won't be able to get back to the server. After the virtual netwok has been established you can give the host a static IP. Not much point in giving it a static IP before configuring the virtual network as that will just cause th host to complain about duplicate IPs assigned when you try to statically assign the virtual NIC to the same IP.

If the server is from a tier 1 manufacturer I suggest getting the out of band management module that gives you KVM and power management over the network. For Dell it is iDRAC Enterprise, HP it is iLO. This allows you to get back to your server even if the network settings are messed up, it blue screened, etc. On the Dell it can even share the same network port for by the host (and VMs).  

relliott66,


This worked beautifully to create the virtual switch that would previously disconnect my RDC session.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/02/19/script-creating-an-external-virtual-network-with-hyper-v.aspx



At this point, the host machine has 2 network adapters..  the physical (with nothing on it except the virtual protocol) and the virtual switch with all the configuration on it.  I've given the virtual switch the static public facing IP assignments.

At this point, I need to give the guest machines their virtual interfaces and attach them to the virtual switch but still have the packets for my RDC session still get routed to the host over the public IP.

As long as your VMs are connected to an external virtual network, everything will get/need its own IP address. At that point everything works just like if they were physical boxes. Your host should not be acting like a router; it should have only 1 IP address assigned to it. Your VMs will need their own IPs.