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Configuring Virtual Network Switches in “Viridian”

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Welcome back everybody. I hope that you found on how to install the "Viridian" CTP to be both informative and educational. Before we move on to installing operating systems inside of VM, we should talk a little bit about how to configure virtual networking.

But first, here’s a quick lesson in the terminology we use. The host is the server that "Viridian" and the hypervisor are running on. The host is sometimes also called the parent, or the parent partition. The guest is the virtual machine that is getting resources from the host machine. It can also be referred to as a child or child partition.

In "Viridian", networking is accomplished through the use of virtual network switches. These are magical, invisible network switches that "Viridian" will "plug" your virtual machine into. Well, ok, they’re really not magical, but they are technically invisible since they don’t exist in any sort of physical sense.

There are three sorts of switches that you can create:

  • External – Allows guests to connect to the same network as the host network adapter.
  • Internal - Allows guests to connect to each other and to the host, but not any external networks.
  • "None" – Allows the guests to connect to each other, but not to the host, and not to any external networks.  Think of this as "Guest-only" networking.

To create a switch:

  1. Click Start / Administrative Tools / Windows Virtualization Management.
  2. In the left-hand pane, make sure that your "Viridian" server is selected. If it is not in the list, right-click on Virtualization Services and add it.
  3. In the right-hand pane, click Virtual Network Management.
  4. Choose the type of network switch that you want to add, and click Add.
  5. Change the name of the switch to something that makes sense to you – I typically name it after the type of connection that it offers.
  6. If you’re making an External switch, select the physical adapter you want the connections to go through from the list (you’ll notice that wireless adapters aren’t listed – 802.11x doesn’t provide everything we need to make this work, so they’re not usable).
  7. Click Apply / OK. You’ve just created yourself a Virtual Switch.

On a total side note, a few people have asked me about why I keep putting the word "Viridian" in quotes. "Viridian" is the codename for this technology, and I want to make sure that when I refer to it by the codename, it stands out. We will definitely not be calling it "Viridian" when it ships. 

"Viridian."  (I just couldn't resist.)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2007
    PingBack from http://www.artofbam.com/wordpress/?p=2941

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2007
    Can you say anaything about the NAT and VLAN capabilities of the virtual switches? I could see options for setting VLAN ID, but no NAT options (and no DHCP server option like Virtual Server 2005 has). Also, is the limit of 8 virtual NICs per VM going to stay?

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2007
    Earlier this week, I posted instructions on how to install the "Viridian" CTP on Windows Server 2008

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2007
    I spoke with our developer again, and he suggested that you keep all of the network infrastructure services on the host machine, and interface with the virtual switches and virtual networks that way.  It would get you past the 8 NIC limit, and, according to him, performance would be better. You should note, however, that it's considered "Best Practice" to run Windows Server virtualization as the only service on a server for performance reasons.

  • Anonymous
    October 03, 2007
    Mike, Thanks for looking into this and sorry I missed your reply! It's definitely an option to do it on the host, but there's two reasons why I don't like the idea (in addition to the best practice you mention)

  1. It reduces portability between physical hosts. Sure, NAT / RRAS setups can be scripted, and ISA configs can be moved, but if you've got everything in a VM it's a lot easier to move it than to install windows on bare metal, install ISA / config RRAS.
  2. You can't easily do tiered setups within one physical machine. Don't get me wrong, 8 NICs is defnitely a great improvement over 4, but more would be very nice, even if there's a performance penalty. cheers, Aitor