One nice feature of virtual machines is the ability to set up advanced features. In the Advanced Features section (see Figure 13.7), there are multiple settings that you can configure.
MAC Addressing The first thing that you can configure in the Advanced Features section is setting a MAC address. The MAC address is a physical address that is associated to the NIC adapter. You can set the MAC address to Dynamic (it creates its own MAC addresses) or Static (this is where you can set a MAC address).
You also have the ability to do MAC spoofing. This is where a VM can change the source MAC address in outgoing packets to one that is not assigned to the NIC adapters.
DHCP Guard DHCP Guard drops DHCP server messages from unauthorized virtual machines pretending to be a DHCP server. So what does this mean to you? If a server tries to pretend to be a DHCP server, your virtual machine will drop any messages that are sent by that DHCP server.
Router Guard Router Guard drops router advertisement and redirection messages from unauthorized virtual machines pretending to be routers. It works almost the same way DHCP Guard works. If an unauthorized router tries to send messages to a virtual machine, that VM will not accept those messages.
Protected Network You can set Network Health Detection at the virtual machine level for a Hyper- V host cluster. This is configured as a Protected Network. When you select the Protected Network check box, the virtual machine will be moved to another cluster node if a network disconnection is detected. If the health of a network connection is showing as disconnected, the VM will be automatically moved.
Port Mirroring Port mirroring allows the network traffic of a virtual machine to be monitored by copying incoming and outgoing packets and forwarding the copies to another virtual machine configured for monitoring.
NIC Teaming NIC Teaming gives you the ability to allow multiple network adapters on a system to be placed into a team. You can establish NIC Teaming in the guest operating system to aggregate bandwidth and provide redundancy. This is useful if teaming is not configured in the management operating system.
Device Naming Device naming causes the name of the network adapter to be propagated into supported guest operating systems.
VM Checkpoints
One thing that you may want to set up on your Hyper-V server is recovery points or checkpoints. A checkpoint is a snapshot in time from when you can recover a virtual machine. It’s like taking a picture of the virtual machine and using that picture to recover the VM. You can create multiple checkpoints of a VM and then recover back to any of those checkpoints if there is an issue. Using a more recent recovery point will result in less data lost. Checkpoints can be accessed from up to 24 hours ago.
If you want to enable these checkpoints in time for Hyper-V , you just need to follow these steps:
- In Hyper- V Manager, right- click the virtual machine and choose Settings.
- In the Management section, select Checkpoints.
- To enable checkpoints for a VM, select Enable Checkpoints. If you want to disable checkpoints, just clear the check box.
- Click Apply. Once you are finished, click OK and close Hyper- V Manager.
Software Load Balancing
Windows Server 2022 Hyper- V also allows you to distribute virtual network traffic using software load balancing (SLB). SLB allows you to have multiple servers hosting the same virtual networking workload in a multitenant environment. That way, you can set up high availability.
Using SLB allows you to load- balance virtual machines on the same Hyper-V server. Let’s take a look at how SLB works. SLB is possible because it sets up a virtual IP address (VIP) that is automatically mapped to the dynamic IP addresses (DIP) of the virtual machines. The DIP addresses are the IP addresses of the virtual machines that are part of the load- balancing setup.
So, when someone tries to access the resources in the load- balancing setup, they access it by using the VIP address. The VIP request then gets sent to the DIP address of the virtual machines. So, users use the single VIP address, and that address gets sent to the load- balancing virtual machines.
Understanding Live Migration
Before we can implement live migration, you should understand what live migration does for Hyper- V. Hyper- V live migration transfers a running virtual machine from one physical server to another. The real nice advantage is that during the move of the virtual machine, there is no impact on the network’s users. The virtual machine will continue to operate even during the move. This is different from using Hyper-V Quick Migration. Quick Migration required a pause in the Hyper- V VM while it’s being moved.
Live migration lets you move virtual machines between servers. This is very useful when a Hyper- V server starts having issues. For example, if a Hyper-V machine is starting to have hardware issues, you can move the virtual machines from that Hyper-V server to another server that is running properly.
When setting up VM migrations, you have a few options. You can live- migrate a VM, Quick Migrate a VM, or just move a VM. As stated before, live migration requires no interruption of the VM. Quick Migration requires that you first pause the VM, then save the VM, then move the VM, and finally restart the VM. Moving a virtual machine means that you are going to copy a VM from one Hyper- V server to another while the virtual machine is turned off.
So, if you decide to use live migrations, there are a few things you should understand before setting it up. Let’s take a look at some of the settings you can configure.
