Advance features of HYPER-V Virtual Network Adapter - Part 7

In previous article Advance features of HYPER-V Virtual Network Adapter - Part 6 describe most of the Advance features for Network Adapter in HYPER-V.

Today i will cover and these that i didn't catch up.

So let's start

• Open Hyper-v Manager
• Select Virtual Machine that you want configure the Advance Features of Network Adapter.
• From the right side select Settings

• From the left side find and expand Network Adapters
• Select Advance Features
• Today will cover the following features
  1. Enable MAC Address Spoofing
  2. Protected Network
  3. NIC Teaming 

Enable MAC Address Spoofing

If you read in  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_spoofing MAC spoofing is a technique for changing a factory-assigned Media Access Control (MAC) address of a network interface on a networked device.

You can think why to use MAC Address  Spoofing in Virtual Machine of HYPER-V?  

In some scenarios like Network Load Balance (NLB) is major requirements . Unless it's sure that you have problems.

I will not explain in details but the Network Load Balancing (NLB) feature distributes traffic across several servers by using the TCP/IP networking protocol...... I f you are interesting and you want to implement then you can read  more details in the article Network Load Balancing by Microsoft to fully understand .

I understand that these are very advance options and maybe will not use it but you never know.

So let's go to explain how can enable the MAC Address Spoofing.

• Open HYPER-V Manager
• Select the Virtual Machine that you would like to enable MAC Address Spoofing
• Click Settings from the right side

• Expand Network Adapter
• Click in Advance Features
• From the right side check the Enable MAC Address Spoofing.

That's it. Very easy.

Protected Network

Every network adapter that is added in Virtual Machine of Windows Server 2012 R2 automatically configure as protected network. For a single HYPER-V Host this means nothing.

But if you have a HYPER-V Failover Clustering monitoring the network connection for any link failure. 

Protected network feature detect if the virtual switch that belong the Virtual Machine hasn't functional network connectivity and move the virtual machine in another HYPER-V Host Cluster.

How it's work? Before start the migration first check if the other cluster has a functioning network connection to avoid migration of virtual machine in a cluster without network connection.

If you have use before HYPER-V Failover Clustering this is the Live Migration that happened when one of the Cluster has a problem and bring offline. Then the Virtual Machines start the Live Migration automatic in the other Cluster.

Let's explain how can enable Protected Network feature

• Open HYPER-V Manager
• Select the Virtual Machine that you would like to enable MAC Address Spoofing
• Click Settings from the right side

• Expand Network Adapter
• Click in Advance Features
• Tick in Protected Network from the right side

NIC Teaming 

We know that you can use Nic Teaming for Bandwidth aggregation and Failover in HYPER-V Host.

In Windows Server 2012 R2 you have the option to use Nic Teaming in Virtual Machine instead of HYPER-V Host.

Why to use NIC Teaming in Virtual Machine? The answer is with NIC Teaming in Virtual Machine that every Hyper-v Virtual Switch can configure it to use it's own SR-IOV capable NIC.

As a beginner maybe can't understand the answer. But you can read more details to full understand in NIC Teaming in Virtual Machines (VMs) if you are interesting and you would like to go one step further

So let's start to explain step by step how can enable the NIC Teaming in Virtual Machine.

• Select the Virtual Machine and click Settings from the right side.

• Before start to configure NIC Teaming you must have create a Virtual Switch as External Type.
• If you don't know how you can read How to install the first Virtual Machine in HYPER-V - Part 3 in the Create Virtual Switch Section.
• Or you can use powershell to create the Virtual Switch and isolate the traffic with Virtual network adapters.
• After finish from the Virtual Machine Settings go in Add Hardware and create 2 Network Adapters.
• After create the 2 Network Adapters go in every Network adapter expanded and select Advance features.
• From the right side select Enable this network adapter to be part of a team in the guest operating system.

• Now start the Virtual Machine and go to create the NIC Team

I will not explain in this article how can create a the NIC Teaming in Virtual Machine but i will do it in a separate Article that will explain all the steps with print screens.

I hope to find article valuable and can help you to understand what features you have when create a new Virtual Machine in HYPER-V

Have a nice weekend!!