Showing posts with label Network Trunking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Network Trunking. Show all posts

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Hyper-V 2012 : VLAN Trunking

During one of our Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 deployment (without GUI) on HP 160 G5, we have come across a very interesting finding of the built-in capabilities where you can now TRUNK VLAN without HP Network Configuration Utility (HPCU)

It was both the shock an excitement that night when both myself and Hafiz found that by adding a DWORD to the registry and a clean restart... VOILA ! the VLAN trunking works as expected.

This is the location to find for the registry key that you have to add.


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e972-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\00xx

xx could be any number so you must open each key and look for your network adapter. If you are using NIC Teaming you probably need to do this for both adapters or all adapters that set up your team, in case you have more than two.




So, what is so great about this ?

Remember back in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, you need to install HPCU (Not an option). After the installation, you have to use HPCU to create VLAN(802.1q) with the NIC port of you choice. 

And the next complication was that for each VLAN that you trunk, there will be additional Network Adapter create for that particular VLAN

Imaging you have 2 NIC ports and you have 5 VLANs that you need to trunk them for the VMs. This will gives you 10 extra Network Adapters show in Network Connections window. MESSY !!!

Now that we can do this without HPCU, you only need to specify the VLAN in the Virtual Network of the VM that want to connect to.