Hyper-V and Windows 2008 on my laptop - how to deal with wireless networking

gbordier — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 22:03:00 GMT

I received a few weeks ago my latest Microsoft laptop and as usual came the question of which OS to install it with.

This time my focus was : go 64 bits and use our latest Windows Server OS, Windows Server 2008 which remarkably was getting out of the doors at that time.

At the same time I had to prepare for my presentations at Techdays France 2008 which I decided to run on Hyper-V. The goal here was to have full portability between my home lab (also on W2K8x64 + HyperV) and my laptop, so if something went wrong with my laptop, I could hopefully connect to my home lab and go on with the demo.

Hyper-V is great, the networking capabilities are getting better and better ... but as a Server Product it was not designed to use my WIFI network adapter, it is not possible to bridge a virtual network to a wireles network adapter. You can use Ben's solution (http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2008/01/09/using-hyper-v-with-a-wireless-network-adapter.aspx), but I do prefer my way, (otherwise I would not be posting) because it lets you keep control of your adressing.

The goal is to create a Windows network bridge and include the virtual network in it.

Here are my steps:
1) Within Hyper-V Virtual Network Manager, create an "Internal Only" network, call it VMNET - it will also create a network adapter within Windows which device name will be the name of the Virtual network.

2) go control panel->network connections Clic your wireless adapter, Ctrl-clic the VMNET bound adapter and then right-clic and choose "bridge"

This way every virtual machines will be bridged to the wireless network and no NAT is involved, pretty handy for the next post ...

Guillaume

Guillaume Bordier's blog : Hyper-V

Hyper-V and Windows 2008 on my laptop - how to deal with wireless networking