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Using Hyper-V with a Wireless Network Adapter

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Out of the box Hyper-V does not support connecting virtual machines to wireless network adapters.  As a primarily server focused product this is a reasonable limitation - especially given evils that we need to do to get wireless network adapters to work with virtual machines.  But all is not lost - it is possible to setup an internal virtual network (as discussed yesterday) and utilize Internet Connection Sharing (as discussed here) to get you up and going.

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 hit OK.

Now to setup Internet Connection Sharing:

  1. Open the Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center.
  2. Select Manage network connections from the list on the left.
  3. Locate the icon for your wireless network adapter, right click on it and select Properties.
  4. Change to the Sharing tab.
  5. Check Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection.
  6. If you have multiple network adapters you will need to select the specific entry for the internal virtual network switch.
  7. Click OK.

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

Cheers,
Ben

Update 5/2/2016: If you are running Windows 10 check out this blog post https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/virtual_pc_guy/2016/05/02/windows-10-hyper-v-and-wireless-a-new-way-to-make-this-all-work/

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2008
    Thanks for the post. I actually had just figured this out myself. :)

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2010
    Thanks for the post! It def. helped me out.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2010
    How about enabling access to the VM's from the internet? Maybe a static route?

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2010
    Nathan - There is basic support in ICS for mapping specific services (like an FTP server) through.  But to do this properly you would want to use full-fledged routing software (like RRAS) instead of just using ICS. Cheers, Ben

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2010
    This however does not work for domain joined servers since most network administrators will disable ICS through Group Policy. I have a demo laptop with Hyper-V running. Many times I am accessing the internet through the corporate wireless. It is not possible to set up ICS in such a scenario for the guest VM's since the ICS is disabled through GPO. Any other ideas?

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2010
    Hi Ben, Thanks for the post; really helped me out!

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2012
    thanks for the post.  It was really helpfull.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2012
    Cheers Ben, this trick still works with Hyper-V running on Windows 8. But I don't understand why Hyper-V still doesn't support a wireless adapter, that shouldn't be too hard to implement?

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2012
    Thanks for the info. I was just fighting with this yesterday!

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2013
    Same problem Win8 - cannot get this to see the 8 wireless adapter when in VM Drive with XP loaded.  Been struggling for 2 weeks to get internet and usb  drive to be seen on Win8 Hyper V drive with XP, no luck.

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2013
    I'm running Windows 8.1 Enterprise.  When I go to the sharing tab of my wifi connection I can enable Sharing but I don't see the option to select a network connection to share with.

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2013
    Good trick!

  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2013
    Using Windows 8 as the parent and setting up my VM with Windows Server 2013 R2, I managed to get the connection setup but it would not let me connect to the internet, keep showing as limited connection on the child. I had the same issue with the bridge method. Giving up I ended up trying to RDP to the VM, in which I had to enable Remote Desk from the Server Management tool on the VM and just like that the internet connection started to work!

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2014
    Don't work with Windows 8.1?

  • No Internet access

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2014
    Thank you!  You'd think this would be communicated in Hyper-V on the Virtual Network Manager

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2014
    After Sharing my Wireless connection with vEthernet  (internal) the internet getting slow, each time IE take 22 Sec to Resolve host name, any Suggestion ?

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2014
    Thanks Ben,  this works with windows server 2012 installed on my laptop

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2014
    Can't get this to work with Generation 2 machines :/

  • Anonymous
    October 06, 2014
    How do you do it so the WLAN connection is seperated from the host OS For example: Wired ETH:HOST only vlan=1 WLAN:guest only vlan=3

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2015
    HERE IS THE WINNING FORMULA : My friends after 5 days of research and hit and trial and 1 pack of Marlboro... lol I finally got my lab up and running. I went in to the DHCP stats and saw there was no DHCP request my the client VM machine. Got me thinking and ....... I decided to configure the DHCP scope in my host machine. Stumbled across this video : www.youtube.com/watch Boom , I saw the DHCP stats and the VM has an IP address from the HOST MACHINE.. Its 3 am in the morning and I am a happy camper...

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2015
    For my Labs i use win 8.1 host machine. External switch is created with wireless adapter and used on all guest OS's to get to Internet. All works perfect. No issues. Used to try 3 machines all of them had Intel Wifi adapters.

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2015
    This doesn't work on Windows 10 Hyper-V.

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2015
    Thank you! Got me out of bind! Pardon the pun!

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2017
    Hmmmm i still have issues with Wifi.I constantly lose connection to the internet even when hyper-v is no tin use.After removing internal virtual switch everetyng works.

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2017
    Hi, Not sure if I did something wrong, but ICMP messages are passing through i.e. I could get result of ping However when I try to do http / https to download some files it hangs looks like some firewall issue but not sure how to proceedThanks

  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2017
    UPDATE 12/27/2017 - As of the latest MS Creative Release in Dec 2017, users can now leverage the "Default Switch" which ships OOTB with Hyper-V. This new feature automatically enables configurations including NAT configurations to allow for users to use either a wired Ethernet or Wifi to connect their VMs. This removes the need for legacy approaches which included using legacy adapters. Here is a link to take you to the release summary - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/11/13/whats-new-in-hyper-v-for-windows-10-fall-creators-update/