Networking your VMs

After getting your Hyper-V server up and running via whichever platform you choose to utilize, the next logical step will be to build a VM – right? So, why are we talking about networking? Because setting up the networks that your VMs are going to plug into is an important baseline and it is worth spending some time thinking about this before you start spinning up new VMs. Every VM will have a network interface, sometimes more than one, and those NICs need to be plugged into a switch; just like with a physical server. However, in the virtual world, we don't use physical switches, so we must tell the VMs which virtual switch to use. That means we must build these virtual switches before we can start making any network connections possible to our VMs.

Planning the right number of physical NICs to be inside your Hyper-V host server is also important. Each physical NIC can only be plugged into one physical switch, so if you plan to host VMs on this host...