NIC Teaming with Microsoft's Hyper-V

I've long been a user of VMware's products.  I had my first experiences with VMware ESX way back in 2004, when I took the VCP course and received my first certification.  At the time, ESX was the gold standard in virtualization and over the years it has constantly evolved.  Microsoft had its own Virtualization product which has now evolved into what we now call Hyper-V.  I've never used Hyper-V until recently.  One of my first challenges when installing Hyper-V was getting NIC teaming to work.  Read on for more!

So, the virtual network concepts are pretty similar to what you'd find in ESX but the execution is different.  One of the first challenges I had was setting up a virtual switch.  When building the server (this was an HP DL380 G7) I used the HP Smart Start CD, which installs all the drivers and utilities necessary for Windows.  I teamed the NICs (4 onboard NICs) and went about isntalling Hyper-V.  Once the role had been added, I created my first virtual switch, assigned one of my two teams to it and started building a guest VM.

The problems started when I tried to connect to the network with my new guest VM.  No matter what I did, I could not get the VM to communicate.  Eventually, I destroyed all the virtual networking configurations I did and destroyed the team in the HP software.  When I rebuilt the network configuration by binding the virtual switch to a single NIC, I was finally able to communicate.

I then turned to our best friend Google and found that Microsoft has basically absolved themselves from providing any sort of network teaming for Hyper-V (CRAZY!!) and left any such support to the vendors themselves.  I understand this logic as Microsoft hasn't provided this functionality themselves previously.  Still, depending on the hardware vendor, this may or may not be supported and thus makes your choice of hardware very important (and the same could still be said regarding VMware).

Thankfully, the crew over at Microsoft Virtualization Blog had a couple links to some HP whitepapers that described how to set up NIC teaming with Hyper-V.  Basically I had to:

1. Remove the Hyper-V role (thankfully this doesn't destroy any VMs you've created!)
2. Remove the HP Network Configuration Utility
3. Install the Hyper-V role
4. Install the HP Network Configuration Utility (version 10.10 or higher - available on ProLiant Support Pack 8.60 or higher)

Anyways, all was good after I did the above and I was able to create my network team, virtual switch and communicate through it!  Good Luck!