What type of virtual switch exists only in Hyper-V server and is accessible only to the virtual machines running on child partitions?

NAKIVO Blog > Hyper-V Administration and Backup > Hyper-V Networking > Hyper-V Virtual Switches Overview

There are three types of virtual switches that may be created in the Virtual Switch Manager. They are External, Internal, and Private. Let’s briefly take a look at the differences between these types of switches.

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Types of Virtual Switches

External – This type of switch is bound to the physical network cards located in the host. As you would imagine, they provide VMs located on these switches with access to the physical network the Hyper-V host is connected to. The External switch can also share management traffic as well as VM traffic on the same switch and this is one of the options that can be set when creating the external switch.

Internal – This switch is not bound to a physical network card so it only allows traffic between VMs and the host itself. However, a new addition to the Internal switch functionality in 2016 is the addition of the NAT forwarding internal switch which does allow external connectivity via NAT from the Hyper-V host.

Private – This type of switch is only used for virtual machines to communicate with each other. This type of switch might be useful for certain specific types of traffic such as cluster network if only using one host as it can’t be utilized between hosts.

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How to create Virtual Switches in Hyper-V?

1. Let’s look at creating virtual switches. Click the Virtual Switch Manager…
2. Click Create Virtual Switch. We will first create an External switch as this type of switch is required to allow connectivity to our guest VMs to the physical network.
3. Choose a meaningful name for the Virtual Switch. Also, creating External switches require that we choose the physical network adapter to use for connectivity.
   1. Additionally, you can choose to allow management operating system to share this network adapter which means management connectivity to your Hyper-V host will also use this adapter.
   2. You can uncheck this box if you have a separate management network adapter or if you will create one manually at a later time. Unchecking will yield the warning that you may lose access to the host unless you have another network adapter used for management communication.
4. Applying the changes will result in a lost ping or two, but no major disruptions.
5. After the switch is created, we now have a virtual switch that we can use when creating a virtual machine for network communication to the outside world.

Thoughts

In this post, we looked at the differences between the various virtual network switches in Hyper-V and what each can be used for along with creating our first external network switch to allow VM connectivity. In the next post, we will take a look at copying over installation media and creating our first virtual machine on the Hyper-V host along with the various settings and options to be configured.

• Article
• 07/29/2021
• 3 minutes to read

Applies to: Windows Server 2022, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2019

A virtual switch allows virtual machines created on Hyper-V hosts to communicate with other computers. You can create a virtual switch when you first install the Hyper-V role on Windows Server. To create additional virtual switches, use Hyper-V Manager or Windows PowerShell. To learn more about virtual switches, see Hyper-V Virtual Switch.

Virtual machine networking can be a complex subject. And there are several new virtual switch features that you may want to use like Switch Embedded Teaming (SET). But basic networking is fairly easy to do. This topic covers just enough so that you can create networked virtual machines in Hyper-V. To learn more about how you can set up your networking infrastructure, review the Networking documentation.

Create a virtual switch by using Hyper-V Manager

1. Open Hyper-V Manager, select the Hyper-V host computer name.

2. Select Action > Virtual Switch Manager.

3. Choose the type of virtual switch you want.

   Connection type Description

   External	Gives virtual machines access to a physical network to communicate with servers and clients on an external network. Allows virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server to communicate with each other.
   Internal	Allows communication between virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server, and between the virtual machines and the management host operating system.
   Private	Only allows communication between virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server. A private network is isolated from all external network traffic on the Hyper-V server. This type of network is useful when you must create an isolated networking environment, like an isolated test domain.

4. Select Create Virtual Switch.

5. Add a name for the virtual switch.

6. If you select External, choose the network adapter (NIC) that you want to use and any other options described in the following table.

   Setting name Description

   Allow management operating system to share this network adapter	Select this option if you want to allow the Hyper-V host to share the use of the virtual switch and NIC or NIC team with the virtual machine. With this enabled, the host can use any of the settings that you configure for the virtual switch like Quality of Service (QoS) settings, security settings, or other features of the Hyper-V virtual switch.
   Enable single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)	Select this option only if you want to allow virtual machine traffic to bypass the virtual machine switch and go directly to the physical NIC. For more information, see Single-Root I/O Virtualization in the Poster Companion Reference: Hyper-V Networking.

7. If you want to isolate network traffic from the management Hyper-V host operating system or other virtual machines that share the same virtual switch, select Enable virtual LAN identification for management operating system. You can change the VLAN ID to any number or leave the default. This is the virtual LAN identification number that the management operating system will use for all network communication through this virtual switch.

8. Click OK.

9. Click Yes.

Create a virtual switch by using Windows PowerShell

1. On the Windows desktop, click the Start button and type any part of the name Windows PowerShell.

2. Right-click Windows PowerShell and select Run as Administrator.

3. Find existing network adapters by running the Get-NetAdapter cmdlet. Make a note of the network adapter name that you want to use for the virtual switch.

   Get-NetAdapter

4. Create a virtual switch by using the New-VMSwitch cmdlet. For example, to create an external virtual switch named ExternalSwitch, using the ethernet network adapter, and with Allow management operating system to share this network adapter turned on, run the following command.

   New-VMSwitch -name ExternalSwitch -NetAdapterName Ethernet -AllowManagementOS $true

   To create an internal switch, run the following command.

   New-VMSwitch -name InternalSwitch -SwitchType Internal

   To create an private switch, run the following command.

   New-VMSwitch -name PrivateSwitch -SwitchType Private

For more advanced Windows PowerShell scripts that cover improved or new virtual switch features in Windows Server 2016, see Remote Direct Memory Access and Switch Embedded Teaming.

Next step

Create a virtual machine in Hyper-V