Internet in VM’s with Hyper-V & Windows 8

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With the introduction of Windows 8 the great feature Hyper-V is added. I have noticed that some people are struggling with their network settings in their virtual machines on Hyper-V. In this blog post I will share my Hyper-V network setup on my laptop. I hope this blog post will help you if you are having problems with your Hyper-V network.

To be flexible it is common to use a WiFi network adapter to give your virtual machines internet access. But what if no WiFi is available or the WiFi is unstable? You can change the Hyper-V switch to the LAN adapter but it is not practical.

To always get internet on the virtual machines I have bridged my network adapters. This way my virtual machine will get access by WiFi or LAN and I don’t have to choose. To accomplish this I have created a internal switch and give it a name for external use.

In the screenshot you can see I have created 2 virtual switches. The external virtual switch is used to share internet on my virtual machines.

I have bridged the “vEthernet (External)” with my LAN and WiFi adapter. When I attach the “External” virtual switch to a virtual machine I will have internet access.