Connecting Hyper-V virtual machines to the wireless network adapter can be a painful experience. I was wondering why it is so hard and poorly documented. As explained here, probably the reason is that the product is primarily targeted for servers where we always have wired networks.
To connect the VM to the wireless network, we have to create a virtual switch. There are two types of virtual switches: Internal and External. I initially managed to get it to work with the internal switch, but it stopped working after some time. External Virtual Switch has more chances of working based on what I gathered from blogs on this topic. It did work for me but after some effort as I was getting the following error:
Error applying virtual switch properties changes (catastrophic failure)
I was able to overcome this by running the following on Command Prompt (Admin Mode).
netcfg -d
Please run this command at your own risk as it will reset your host network connections. You will be disconnected from network and security key will be required for reconnection.
After resetting the network connections using above command, I followed the steps for creating external switch and it worked.
Internal Virtual Switch
Internal switch configuration requires minimum changes to the host network settings and it doesn’t expose your guest machine to the internet. But it may or may be work for your system configuration.
- For brief and to the point instructions, check this page at Ben Armstrong’s Virtualization Blog
- For detailed instructions with screen shots, go to this page
Another way of making internal switch work is described here, but it didn’t work for me.
External Virtual Switch
The external option requires more changes to the network settings. Instructions for setting up external virtual switch can be found here.
