virtualbox - Simple networking: Hyper-V Internal Virtual Switch on Windows 8.1

06
2014-04
  • Annie

    I am running Windows 8.1. I have downloaded Windows Vista VM for IE7 testing from http://modern.ie

    I also have VirtualBox installed to use with vagrant. Since Hyper-V is not yet supported by vagrant.

    When I create a virtual machine with VirtualBox, the default network configuration do the following:

    • Webserver running on host can be accessed by guest and vice versa.
    • Both host and guest OS can be accessed via the Internet.

    When I create a virtual machine with Hyper-V and assign External network, the following happens:

    • The host looses its Internet connectivity
    • Guest gets connected to the Internet.
    • Webserver running on host is not accessible on guest.

    When I assign to the Internal network and in physical Ethernet connection property I share Internet connection with vEthernet Hyper-V's connection on host, the following transpires:

    • Host is connected to the Internet.
    • Webserver running on host is not accessible on guest.
    • Guest has not Internet connectivity.

    Questions:

    1. How to mimic the default behavior of VirtualBox in Hyper-V? That is; make both guest and host connected to Internet as well as internally.
    2. Is it an abnormal behavior happening due to VirtualBox installation? Some kind of a conflict?

    I tried Hyper-V on several other machines running Windows 8 in past. But I am never able to get the Hyper-V networking straight.

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  • Voyager529

    My laptop running Windows 8 Pro RTM with 12GB of RAM also serves as an "ant farm" where I was testing out a set of Linux appliances. I had three virtual switches: one that shared my wireless adapter, one that shared the wired adapter, and one for the internal network. An Endian VM routed traffic between the external connections and the internal ones, and provided DHCP services to the VMs that were running. I was able to successfully use Opera and Filezilla on my laptop to get to all of the browser based and SSH services (e.g. Webmin on the LAMP appliance I was working with), and all was well.

    In other words, my wireless adapter (say, 10.10.0.24/24) would provide external access to the Endian (192.168.5.1/24), which would in turn route traffic between the Wordpress appliance (192.168.5.2), the outside world (e.g. themes and updates from Wordpress.com), and my laptop itself.

    One day recently, for no discernible reason, traffic stopped flowing betweem my laptop and the guests. I killed the Endian and rebuilt it, no dice. I was only able to configure it from a guest internally (where I did enable DHCP, DNS, etc.). None of the other VMs were accessible from the host, either, only from within the guest network.

    DHCP Guard is off. Router Advertisement Guard is off. Endian is successfully leasing IP addresses to guests. The internal switch is explicitly an 'internal', not a 'private' one. Neither the Endian nor any other VM on the virtual LAN will respond to a ping direct from my laptop. The Endian, along with the rest of the servers, however, can successfully get to the internet.

    How do I restore communication between my laptop and the virtual machines it contains?


  • Related Answers
  • voyager529

    Solved my own issue: While I swore that the Endian box was configured with DHCP enabled, it wasn't. Thus, the bridge adapter between the host and the guest LAN wasn't leasing an IP address, because there was no one to lease it from. I static IP'd a guest box and enabled DHCP on the Endian. The host can now successfully talk to the virtual machines.