I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

If you’ve ever installed Microsoft Hyper-V on a server that has a wireless network card and has the Wireless LAN feature enabled, you have probably noticed Hyper-V does not support connecting virtual machines to wireless network adapters (it only lists the existing wired physical adapters when offered the option to create the Virtual Adapters). There’s a great article on Ben Armstrong’s blog describing just how to work around this…

The technical reason for this is really simple: in order to perform the virtual networking required by Hyper-V, Microsoft implemented an OSI layer 2 filter driver that creates network packets with the MAC address of the appropriate virtual machine. Unfortunately the wireless networking standard explicitly forbids the creation of network packets with different MAC addresses to that of the physical computer (for obvious security purposes).

As a primarily server-focused product, this is a reasonable limitation for Hyper-V. But all is not lost, as it is actually possible to setup an internal virtual network and use Internet Connection Sharing to make this work. The first thing to do is to create a new internal virtual network switch:

1. Open the Hyper-V Manager and select your server.
2. Select Virtual Network Manager… from the action pane (on the right).
3. Select New virtual network and choose to Add an Internal network.
4. Give the new virtual network the name you want and then click OK.

Now, onwards to setting up Internet Connection Sharing:

1. Open the Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center.
2. Select Manage network connections (or Change adapter settings in Windows 2008 R2) from the list on the left.
3. Locate the icon for your wireless network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
4. Go to the Sharing tab.
5. Check the Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection option.
6. If you have multiple network adapters, you will need to select the specific entry for the internal virtual network switch you’ve created earlier, and click OK.

You will now be able to connect virtual machines to the internal virtual network and allow them to access the Internet through your wireless network adapter.

Hope this helps!

Freshly out of the Microsoft Connect beta, Network Monitor 3.2 is now available for download. Here are some of the new features:

• Process Tracking: Now you can identify rogue applications sending network data! View all the processes on your machine generating network traffic (process name and PID). Use the conversation tree to view frames associated with each process.
• Capture engine re-architecture to improve capture rate in high-speed networks. Network Monitor 3.2 is now supposed to drop significantly fewer frames that Network Monitor 3.1.
• Find conversations. Many users found conversation tracking to be difficult to use as the view grew hard to manage, and it was difficult to correlate the frames they were seeing with the conversation nodes in the tree. Now, you can quickly isolate frames in the same network conversation. Just right-click on a frame and select a conversation to track, and you will see all the frames in that conversation. You can view TCP streams, HTTP flows etc.
• Extensive parser set: Parsers for over 300 protocols! As before, the parsers are fully customizable.
• Better parser management: By default only a subset of parsers are loaded. You can load the full parser set by going to Tools>Options>Parser and choose Full vs. Stub implementations.
• Network Monitor API, and extensive documentation of both the API and NPL: You can create your own applications that capture, parse and analyze network traffic!
• And much more… You can check the Release Notes in the Help directory of the installation folder for a complete list of new features and known issues.

Windows Server 2008 officially launched yesterday with little fanfare; but the new enterprise-class operating system has been eagerly awaited by people who eagerly await operating systems, instead of going out and having a good time with their lives.

NetworkWorld has a thorough review of the W2K8 OS up on their site, but spends a bit of time tracking the performance of the network input output in various tests.

We tested network I/O performance using both emulated I/O and various traffic/assault tests (see How we did it) and found Windows 2008 Server performance has improved – and especially improved when Vista is the client…

The new stacks also have the ability to dynamically respond to communications latency in network connections as they possess the ability to dynamically change TCP packet window size, which allows a communication channel to be more efficiently stuffed with data.

This isn’t that surprising; Vista’s redesigned TCP/IP stack was previously covered in detail all over the web when Vista came out. What is interesting however, is that Vista provides the most benefit. Adoption of new server OSes tends to be slow, but so has adoption of Vista on work client computers, with many choosing to stay with XP SP2. For companies concerned about network performance; W2K8 might speed up adoption of desktop Vista. But conversely, Vista’s drawbacks (real and perceived) might slow down adoption of W2K8.

In testing it was found that under light loads, the effects in terms of speed of tasks like copying folders, streaming media and loading complex Web pages aren’t strongly demonstrated, but the effects under heavy loads, however, favors performance for Vista, strongly. Depending on the mixture of I/O (but pronounced under streaming media and heavy file copying), Vista can be as much as 43% faster than Windows XP SP2 in copying operations and 18% faster in opening concurrent streams.