Hyper-V and Wireless Network Cards

Hi Everyone,

Quick note: if you found this information helped you, please leave a comment – thanks!

Well, chances are that if you’re using Hypervisor (Hyper-V) as I am, you might also be using a Wireless Network Interface Card (NIC) to connect to the Internet and/or other sources.  Personally, I prefer the versatility.

Hyper-V doesn’t support wireless network cards by design (which I happen to disagree with). 

Unfortunately besides something like  “As a primarily server focused product this is a reasonable limitation” – I can’t get much more of a rationale other than “it makes sense not to support wireless network cards” for Hyper-V.

Well, agree or disagree, if you want to have Virtual Machines hosted in Hyper-V connecting to a network via a wireless network card, you’ll have to do something which is surprisingly simple.

First off, don’t bother with adding the Network Policy and Access Role.  This requires port forwarding (according to an unhelpful article I read) and is not necessary.

Secondly, don’t bother with Internet Connection Sharing (another unhelpful blog post elsewhere).  ICS makes your shared NIC a static IP address which may not be convenient for your network setup (it sure wasn’t for mine), plus ICS is stupid for any meaningful network setup.

So, to our actual solution. 

The premise

1. I have Windows Server 2008 x64 with Hyper-V (RTM)
2. Hosted in Hyper-V is a guest OS.
3. My server has a wireless (WLAN) card and is setup appropriately
4. I want to allow the guest OS hosted in Hyper-V to use the Wireless network card

Simple enough, right?  Hyper-V is quite happy to let me bind the guest OS to a physical (non-wireless) network card, but not to my wireless NIC.

Solution

In Hyper-V Manager, create an internal virtual network.  Open Hyper-V Manager, click on “Virtual Network Manager” (right hand side of screen).

Next, right hand side of the window select Interla and then “Add” button.  Call the new network whatever you like.  Mine is called ‘WWW’ (as you can observe in the screen shot below):

Once everything is properly configured, open Control Panel –> Network and Sharing Centre.  Click on the left hand side “Manage Network Connections”.

Select both your Wireless Connection and the Virtual Network Connection (mine is called ‘WWW’) and right click and select ‘Bridge Connections’.

Once configured, you should see something like this:

Now, simply assign Virtual Machines to the network you created (mine is called ‘WWW’), and you will be assigned IP addresses depending on the status of your wireless network card.