Making a Wireless Connection Accessible to a Hyper-V Virtual Machine (VM)

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There are a number of resources regarding this that I’ve seen on the Web in various blogs but I’m documenting my approach as much for me so I can remember it as for you as well. There have been a number of conferences that I have arrived at expecting to have a hard-wired connection to the internet to find out that there is only a wireless connection available. When your presentation demos are relying on VMs running under Hyper-V on the laptop, this is a showstopper since natively the VMs rely on a hard-wired connection being served up by Hyper-V. So how does one get around this and share the host machine’s wireless connection with the Hyper-V VMs? Again, this is the way I have done it, it certainly is not the only way. It’s simple to setup and once there I can toggle to use the wireless connection for the VM whether the VM is already running, saved or shutdown.

How to share a wireless connection with Hyper-V VMs:

  • In Hyper-V Manager, under Actions, click Virtual Network Manager…
  • In Virtual Network Manager, select Internal and click Add
    • Provide a name like, Internet Wireless Connection, and click OK
  • On the host machine open the Control Panel, click Network and Internet, click View Network Status and Tasks, and click Change Adapter Settings
    • Here you will see the new “Internet Wireless Connection”
    • Hold down the Ctrl-key (to make multiple selections) and click on your new “Internet Wireless Connection” and then click on the “Wireless Network Connection”
    • Now that both are selected, right-click on either one of the selected connections and choose Bridge.
  • That’s it for creating the Bridged connection.
  • Now, in Hyper-V Manager, click on the VM that you want to make the wireless connection available to (the machine can either be running or off which makes it nice so you can actually change this on the fly).
    • With the VM selected, open its Settings…
    • Click on the Network Adapter that was previously associated with the External wired connection.
    • In the drop-down under Network: select your new “Internet Wireless Connection” and click OK.
  • Once you start the VM, or if running once the network resets, you should be all set.
  • Don’t forget to change this to the wired connection again once you get back on a hard-wire.

So, on with the demos!

Enjoy!