VLAN Settings and Hyper-V

One of the features of Hyper-V is VLAN support.  This is a little bit confusing - so let me explain how it works.

For every virtual network adapter you connect to a virtual machine you can specify a VLAN ID to be used by that virtual machine.  In order for this to work you need:

  • A physical network adapter that supports VLANs.
  • A physical network adapter that will accept network packets with VLAN IDs already applied (not all network adapters support this).
  • To configure your switch to allow network traffic on the physical port for the VLAN IDs that you want to use inside virtual machines.

You can also specify a VLAN ID on the virtual network switch configuration.  This is not the default VLAN ID to be used for the virtual network switch (as some assume) but it is the VLAN ID that will be used by the parent partition virtual network adapter that is connected to the virtual network switch (as discussed here).  It is possible to connect multiple virtual machines using different VLAN IDs to the same virtual network switch (but of course they will not be able network with each other).

Cheers,
Ben