Today I had an interesting battle getting some Virtual Machines connected to the Internet from within their host operating system, Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper V.
Initially, the baffling thing was that I could not enable my Broadcom wireless network adapter on the host partition itself, i.e. from Windows 2008 Server. I dual boot my machine, the other boot option is Windows 7, and it has not problem at all using the card. So I knew there was nothing wrong with the card. Also, the Device Manager on Windows 2008 Server reported that the network adapter was working just fine. I would click enable, and it would say “Enabled”, and then revert to being disabled. Furthermore, it was a little challenging to Google a solution without network access! How did we ever get by before?
Anyway, I got on my other boot partition and found an article that explained what was going on. Apparently you have to add the OS Feature “Wireless LAN Service” for W2K8 to enable wireless adapter access. By default this feature is not enabled.
To do this, start the Server Manager, choose Add Features, and check the Wireless LAN Service feature. Voila, you can now use your wireless adapter!
Once I had the WEP key and so on configured, I fired up a Virtual Machine, expecting to be able to connect to the Internet. Whoa! Not so fast! Hmmm…. then I remembered you have to configure a virtual network adapter, so I went to the Hyper V Manager to set up a new Virtual Network that would connect to the Wireless Adapter…not! The Wireless Adapter was not in the list of Network Adapters:
Hmmm…. well at least now I had Internet access so I could Google away, and came upon this article that walks you through the process. The basic idea is that you first create a Virtual Internal Network that you connect the VMs to, then use Routing and Remote Access in the host operating system to route this fictional network through the Wireless Adapter. Sadly, after trying the procedure multiple times and pulling my hair out, I could never get this to work. I could ping external addresses from the VMs, but the VMs reported not having any Internet access, and could not surf to well known site.
Oh well, the same article did mention a simpler method: you can just enable ICS (sharing) on the Wireless Adapter. The procedure described was straight forward, and worked well. The only drawback is that your IP addresses end up being in a very strange special range that you can not change. But hey, it worked! Each VM can see the other VMs and the host partition, the host can ping the VMs, and they can all access the Internet using my Wireless Adapter, what more could you ask for on a Sunday night?