Written by Within the team of Virtual Machine MVP’s and whoever else is aware of the extremely powerful concept of Converged Fabric, there is still a lot of debate on how to get this concept working in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. This blog post will help you succeed at this.
My fellow Hyper-V MVP and good friend Aidan Finn blogged about this exact subject only one week ago. I had been working on a few Windows Server 2012 PowerShell cmdlets for the Hyper-V extensible switch myself and had started to try out a few things with Load Balancing Failover (LBFO) network adapter teams, Hyper-V virtual switches adding a few Management OS Virtual NICs to it.
Since I didn’t have any real servers at hand, I was using my two SiteCom USG Gigabit Network Adapters which I fitted in my laptop. The worked wonders for creating a LBFO adapter team while keeping my other adapter for other tasks.
If you are entirely new to the subject, please read Aidan Finn’s blogs on Converged Fabric first. They give you a very good introduction what Converged Fabric means in het Microsoft Private Cloud arena. Just think of your current Hyper-V host network setup with 6 to 8 NICs and made ‘fault tolerant’ with often badly behaving teaming software from HP, Dell, Broadcom, Intel and the likes. I wrote at least a dozen blogs on this topic in the past few years. Microsoft was very right not to support teaming in R2. Although things got better in the end, I am so happy network adapter teaming is now an integral part of Windows Server 2012. Of course LBFO adapter teams can be created by a PowerShell one-liner.
I saw a comment from Aidan that his published PowerShell script for creating the Converged Fabric was broken after moving from Windows Server 8 beta to Windows Server 2012 RC.
This blog will describe how I created the LBFO team, virtual (extensible) switch, Management OS vEthernet networks. The script closely resembles what Aidan has described in his PowerShell Script To Create A Converged Fabric For Clustered Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Host blog, but all commands now also work in Windows Server 2012.
What has changed:
- Adapter names are now automatically named with syntax “vEthernet (Name Adapter)” so be careful when you use the –InterfaceAlias parameter
- The parameter –IPv4Address has been changed to –IPAddress
This is how my network looks like when the PowerShell commands have been run
My LBFO team has only one adapter called Internal LAN, but you can test with it without a problem, except that it does not offer any Fail Over capability. It’s just a lab.
