Using VLAN tagging with Hyper-V - reduces management!

I’ve been spending majority of my free time rebuilding our core infrastructure services in our data center at the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago. We’re moving offices in December 2008, so perfect time to do this.

I’ve been wanting to look into VLAN identification feature of Hyper-V, and see how this can really benefit us and our customers. After some reading and experimentation got it figured out and wanted to share my experience...

In the old days, I’d have a physical NIC for each VLAN and configure the switch port the NIC went into to be “hardcoded” (untagged in HP ProCurve lingo) to a VLAN.

On the Server, I have it configured according to the common preferred practices: one NIC on Management network used only for management, the others are are cabled to a port on our ProCurve switch . Important note: the physical NICs themselves are not VLAN tagged (i.e. properties of the NIC card), but the port on the switch that the NIC goes into is marked as TAGGED.

Now, I build out lots of VMs. In Hyper-V / SCVMM, I can indicate which VLAN I want the VM to be on. This now makes it a BREEZE for me to say which VLAN I want a server to participate on, I can switch it from network to network without having to go into the ProCurve tool, and can even script it for installs (for example, start on management network for the building and patching… and then VLAN it over to the customer network when all done). And now, can even do more from a single management console – SCVMM.