Managing and Configuring Hyper-V Virtual Switches -- Default, Internal, External, and Private

when i'm working with my students in our networking lab we do a ton of virtualized networks and one of the most common questions i get from my students is troy which virtual switch should i use here virtual switches they can be confusing so in this video let's deconfuse them unconfuse them might we can let's figure out virtual switches [Music] hey everybody troy here today we're doing a deep dive into the wonderful world of virtual switches we're going to be walking through the four most common virtual switch configurations comparing them side by side so you can see exactly which switch does what and in what circumstances so you can learn to apply these switches yourself for your own virtual environments now there's a lot to cover in today's video as always time stamps are going to be available to you in the description below jump around to the particular switch you're most interested in or we'll walk through every switch one by one together and you'll get a feel for these things in action let's start with a quick look at my topology this is what i'm working with i've got a hyper-v environment running with two virtual machines that have yet to be assigned a virtual switch i'm running two instances of windows server 2022 all i'm using these for is to help us test and visualize these virtual switches now before i go too far though i do want to stipulate that although i'm using a hyper-v environment these switch configurations are common to vmware as well as virtualbox so even though i'm using microsoft hyper-v client you'll be able to use the same mentality and concepts to other virtualized environments if you're using a different application all right let's jump to our first virtual switch it's probably the simplest one to use it's very very common and it's also one of the easiest to understand it's something we call the private virtual switch now if you've seen many of my videos you'll see i'm using a private switch all the time the reason i do it is it provides me a nice isolated virtual environment and by isolated what i mean is my virtual machines can talk amongst themselves i can build a complete interconnected network here virtually and there's no connection with my local area network now that lets me do all sorts of cool things in my virtualized environment without risk of affecting anything in my live environment all right let's deploy a private switch and see this thing in action what i'm going to do is jump first to my hyper-v manager you see i've got my two virtual machines sitting there running ready for me to apply this switch and i'm going to have to first build this switch now in hyper-v i have an option to manage my virtual switches via something called the virtual switch manager over here on the right-hand side i'm going to open it up and the first thing you're going to see is that there already exists one switch called the default switch now we are absolutely going to talk about that switch today but before i get there i want to talk about some of these more simpler switches but what you can see is that the private switch does not exist the first thing i have to do is i have to use my create virtual switch option you'll see that i have different options external internal private now the one we're after first is the private switch and it tells you exactly what the switch does it creates a virtual switch that can be used only by the virtual machines that run on the physical computer what that's saying is that there's no connectivity using this switch from your virtual machines to your host environment creating one is as simple as clicking the create virtual switch button i now have a chance to name it i'm going to keep it nice and simple i'm going to call it private and you can see right here that the connection type defaults to what i request the private setting okay good stuff i'm going to hit apply that private switch is now created and ready to be attached to my virtual machines i'm going to hit ok now essentially what i did everybody is i built that that's what we did now what we're going to do is we're going to attach our two virtual machines and watch them connect via that private switch now first things first i need to assign this new virtual switch to these virtual machines now i can do this while they're running because these are gen2 machines i'm going to right click on each of them independently i'm going to right click on test 0 1 select the settings option and right here i've got a chance to define the network adapter aka the virtual switch that is going to connect to this machine all i need simply do is select my network adapter option and then i'm going to select from the drop down list right here the switch that i want i want private that's what i just built i'm going to hit apply and now that adapter is connected to the machine in effect this machine now has a private virtual interface let's hit ok and let's do the same thing for the second virtual machine a right click on the machine name down to the network adapter from the drop down list i'm going to hit the word private i'm going to hit apply and there we go now as i said all i've done now is interconnect these two machines now this is a completely isolated and separate environment which means i have to decide the address space the connectivity all of this is now in my control now by default these machines would be looking to be dynamically addressed they're looking for a dhcp server as you can see that although i'm running windows server 2022 i've not configured either one to be those i need to manually apply some static addresses i'm going to jump to my virtual machines and there they are test one test two there they are ready to have an address assigned let's do that right click on open network and internet settings i'm going to click on my change adapter options there's my adapter and i'm going to go to our properties for tcpipv4 let's change the default from obtain an ip address automatically and let's assign a static address let's keep it nice and simple how about some 10s 10 10 10 1 on let's do a slash 24 there we go now i don't currently have a default gateway configured that also means i don't have a path to the internet one of the unique things about a private isolated virtual switch environment is that by default there is no outside connectivity to my lan or by extension the internet so i'm not going to worry about putting a default gateway in here nor am i going to worry about a dns server at this point in time i just want to check the connectivity by hitting ok ok close there's my adapter that's all set and let's go over to my second virtual machine do the same thing change the adapter options and there's my ethernet adapter which the vm is recognizing as a private switch ipv4 and let's give it another address on that internal network that i just built i'm going to go 10 10 10 2 and i'm going to go 255 255 255.0 fantastic let's hit ok close that particular window and let's see if we can talk now again what i've built here is i've built connection between these two virtual machines and they should now be able to communicate i'm going to click on the command line for my first machine i'm going to do a little bit of an ipconfig to verify that yes it is received the address i've given it and let's ping its buddy at 10 10 10 2. full round trip for icmp that is telling me that i've got connectivity to my other virtual machine now what i've just proven is that i have interconnectivity between these two virtual machines which is exactly what i was after i could deploy this as a domain controller and a client i could deploy all sorts of cool applications and environments here to test and practice my skills without any connection to my host i can verify that because my host the interface address of my host is 192.168.1.66 which if i were to try to ping that 192 168 1.66 you're going to see that that's going to fail beautiful so private switch completely isolated interconnected with the vms but not talking to the host a good option if you want to build a lab environment to test and work with some machines without the need for internet connectivity excellent let's take a look at the next simplest switch i think is to understand and that's something we call the internal switch let's take a look at another diagram here for you where i can demonstrate visually what this will do we've already deployed connectivity between our two virtual machines using the private switch there was no connectivity as we verified from our virtual network environment to our host lan or our host machine now what if we wanted that well i could change the switch from being private to what we call internal now what that does is it's going to create a special virtual ethernet adapter on my host machine and that ethernet adapter will become part of my virtualized network that means that my host machine can then have an address on that virtual network that i've built and participate in that virtual world that i've created with my vms let me show you i'm going to go back to my virtual switch manager right here what i'm going to do and again just like i had to do with the private switch i'm going to build a new switch there it is right there i want an internal switch i'm going to create a new internal switch and keep it straight i'm going to use my creative switch naming scheme i'm going to call it what it is this is an internal switch pay close attention there is my connection type defaulting to internal and that's what i want to see here now i'm going to hit the apply button and i'm going to hit ok now watch what happened here first let me show you the new virtual adapter on my host machines now i'm just on my host machine navigating to my adapter options here and look at this this was not there before this is what i just created a virtual ethernet interface called internal that's the name i gave it and it identifies exactly what it is now this nick so far as my computer goes is actually a portal to my virtualized environment so let's make it part of that world i gave this computer right here an address of 10 10 10 1. i gave this computer an address of 10 10 10 2. let's make our host part of this world via this virtual ethernet adapter and i'm going to give it an address of say 10 10 10 3. so i work with this nic the same way i work with any other interface i'm going to right click go under my properties option double click my ipv4 again the default option is obtain an ip address automatically i don't want that i'm going to give this an address on my virtual environment and i said i'm going to allocate it as 10 10 10 3. again i'm going to get the correct subnet mask here and click ok ok one more time to close up that window and i'm going to minimize this minimize this screen here go back to my hyper-v manager now i created this new switch i'm going to assign this new switch to my virtual machines again as easy as a right-click test01 i'm going to connect to the settings and now right now it's set to the private adapter i don't want that anymore i want this guy now to be the internal switch so this internal virtual switch it is now connected i'm going to go to test02 settings network adapter private from the list by is where i had it set last i'm going to go to internal now click apply okay and away we go again what i've done here everybody is i've gone to my virtual machine 1 and i've changed the network adapter from private to internal i have done the same thing on test machine two and before i did that i assigned an address on this virtual network space of 10 10 10 3 to my internal virtual ethernet adapter on my host machine let's watch the connectivity i'm going to go here open up my machines and let's grab my command line one more time and this time i'm going to ping let's start off by pinging my neighbor 10 10 2 that's my test to machine that's still working let's now test a ping to my host machine 10 10 10 3 that's the virtual nick of my host couple things to remember i still have no connectivity to the lan so if i wanted to try pinging my host on its lan address of 192.168.1.66 i'm still not connected to it i am still isolated from that local area network again if i wanted to have some kind of network configuration where my host is part of my virtual world an internal switch will do it but that internal configuration is still isolated from my lan and from the internet so under this basic configuration my environment is completely isolated except my host is part of my virtual machine world fantastic we've now done two of the four virtual switches that i want to cover off in this video we've seen private which is a completely isolated virtual machine environment no connection to the host machine or the local area network we've also configured an internal virtual switch which creates a special v ethernet adapter on my host machine allowing it to participate in my virtualized environment again no connectivity to the lan nor any default connectivity to the internet now i know what you're thinking troy we really like the internet what if we want a virtual machine to be able to access the internet how do we do that well the simplest and easiest configuration to make this happen is something called the default switch let's switch our diagrams up you can see this thing in action i'm going to go to this other alternative configuration now you're going to see it looks a lot like the internal configuration that we had the only difference is that i'm not going to utilize that specially created virtual ethernet internal adapter i'm going to connect to the default now no doubt you remember that default switch was already there we saw that in hyper-v switch manager as a matter of fact the moment we turned on windows hyper-v client as a feature in our operating system that virtual ethernet adapter was created that default switch became part of your hyper-v manager library and was ready to be applied to a virtual machine but what does it do well let me demonstrate it in action first and then i'll talk about it and make sense of what we see let's minimize this and go back to my virtual machines now to help me demonstrate this what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click and i'm going to go to my network settings on my virtual machine and what i'm going to do first before i demo this i'm going to go to my my adapter options and i'm going to remove that static addressing that we gave remember we assigned it a manual address of 10 10 10 1. i'm going to change that back to make this dhcp i want to to look for an automatic assignment of an ipv4 address let's do the same thing on my other machine adapter options there's my ethernet adapter protocol 4 obtain automatically both dns and my ip address click ok close and you'll see what i've done here is i've removed that static assignment on those virtual machines now let's take a quick look at my settings on my host remember i have this thing here sitting here called my v ethernet default switch let's take a quick look at it i'm going to go to the properties you're going to see that when i double click on my ipv4 there's an odd looking private address space right there 1721 240.1 on a 255 255 240 mask no default gateway interesting enough no default preferred dns just this weird little ip address and you can see it if i do a command line ipconfig here on my host you're going to see that i can identify that adapter there it is right there sitting right there 21 240.1 now remember that number that's going to become important to us in just a moment i'm going to minimize this minimize this minimize this let's go to my hyper-v manager and let's change the switches or the virtual nics attached to our virtual machines remember in my switch manager the default switch was already created i don't have to do anything special here i'm going to right click on test01 i'm going to move to the settings and i'm going to change my network adapter from internal to default click apply okay let's do the same thing on my second machine there we go network adapter change to default click apply click apply and look at this ooh something cool has happened i have now won these virtual machines these virtual machines have just become part of another network so they found a network and now they're asking whether they want to be discoverable on that network sure let's go yes let's go yes and let's see what happened now i also noticed something else really cool on this virtual machine something else has changed look at this there's no longer a little red x over my ethernet adapter what that means is that i might have internet access let's take a quick look here oh look at that i am now connected to the internet with this virtual machine let's dive deeper i'm going to go to my command line and i'm going to do an ipconfig and let's see what i got now this machine has dynamically received so there was some kind of dhcp process here this machine has dynamically received an address and that address is 172 21 25.185 i'm going to do the same thing over here let's do a command line ipconfig see what i got here this virtual machine has a dynamically assigned address as well 172 21 255 214 feels kind of random but there's actually a bigger planet play look at this number everybody what i want you to do is take a good look there at the default gateways for these machines 172 21 240.1 does that look familiar it should if i go back to my host command line look at that that happens to be the address associated with my default virtual nic on my host machine that's the address of that interface so what we now know is that this particular default switch this v ethernet interface at 172 21 240.1 well that is the default gateway for both of these virtual machines and these virtual machines now not only can talk to each other but they can also talk to the internet let's verify what i'm going to do here is a ping to the other machine so i'm on p i'm on my test pc1 and i'm going to go ping 172 21 255 214 everybody what i'm doing is i'm pinging that address right there get in there there we go there's my ping i can ping my other virtual machine let's see if i can ping my default gateway 172 21 240.1 i can ping the virtual interface of my host now that's really interesting because now i can also ping my friend google let's look at our diagram again to make sense of this here's what's happened this is kind of a magic adapter it's a little different than the internal one we just looked at because of the functionality that it brings it did two important things first off it enabled my host to serve as a dhcp server and automatically hand out dynamically assigned addresses to these two virtual machines my machines can utilize those addresses and interconnect and talk this adapter is also acting as the default gateway for these two machines which means these guys have a path out to the internet now how's it getting there well what this adapter is doing is it's actually performing something we call network address translation nat for short nat now how nat works we could do a complete video on network address translation is an entity unto its own but let me summarize what's happening for you so you know what's going on what this adapter is doing is it's allowing traffic to come from this virtual machine and be translated from the virtual network which we know is a 172 network and grab a temporary assignment an address on my virtual area network now this is all managed by the host it's seamless you don't even see it happening but what it's doing is it's translating my virtual address into an address on my physical network my home local area network and because of that it can then reach my home area network its default gateway which will allow it to get out to the internet now i've shown you that i can get out to the internet with these two machines but there's something else that's really important to know this machine now can talk to anybody on the local area network as well i can show you my physical interface my adapter for my host machine is 192.168.1.66 there's my default gateway my router and if we go back to the virtual machine and i want to do some pinging let me try to ping not just the internet but i'm going to ping the physical adapter of my host i can reach it i can also reach the router look at that i can reach that now this is really important to know because i can reach the interfaces of the devices that are on my local area network this means that my virtual machines are actually intrinsically connected to that local area network any device on my home local area network is now potentially reachable from the virtual machines so the default switch has given me some cool things what it's let me do is dynamically assign these addresses it has also let these machines get out to the internet and interconnect with virtually anything on my home area network the result is a sort of isolated network it's got its own independent address space and i could do all sorts of cool things in here but i do have to realize that the price of my internet connectivity is access to that local area network and if i wanted to use this environment as some kind of sandbox for testing purposes i want to make sure that i realize that there are circumstances under which i can reach my home network thanks to this connectivity but you're thinking hold on one of the reasons i might want to use a virtual machine is to test things that i don't want to test in my real production or my real local area network and i want to use a virtual machine for that this configuration is not your best choice as we said we can connect to my devices on my lan due to the nature of how this works we don't want to be doing anything dangerous in this default environment now if you're running windows 10 or windows 11 that has the capability of client hyper-v you also have the functionality of something we call windows sandbox if i go into my windows feature windows education enterprise and professional has this option called windows sandbox there it is right there and we can enable that and that is another playground for you that is actually designed for testing exactly those questionable things that we want to play with in a completely isolated sandbox environment i'll try to get to do a video on that for you so you can get a demo of that it's very similar to hyper-v in terms of its behavior but it's designed specifically for that reason great another virtual switch down we now have seen private inaction internal inaction and default in action let's look at the last one something we call an external switch okay before we deploy an external switch let's take a quick look at a different diagram what i'm going to do is bring up a slightly amended topology here for you to help you try to visualize this it is a little different than the internal and the private and the default configurations we've been looking at and i've changed the diagram to give you a different view of this now you remember that my machine currently has one network interface card it has one physical network adapter that is connecting me to my local area network and by extension the internet now hyper-v lets me borrow that particular network adapter in effect i can use that adapter as a portal to the outside world with the configuration of an external virtual switch so functionally what happens when i build an external virtual switch what i'm doing is i'm going to attach all of these virtual machines to it and they are going to be using that single network physical interface the one on my host computer as a means to get to the default gateway of my local area network and get out to the world now it will be creating another special virtual ethernet adapter it'll be working a little bit differently than the internal one did as well as the default basically what this adapter is going to let me do is choose whether my host machine wants to be part of this new local area network configuration or not and depending on what i'm building i'll have to make that decision let me demonstrate so in order to make the most sense of this the first thing i'm going to do is start with a clean slate i'm going to move to my adapter on my virtual machine and i'm going to change the state of this adapter i'm going to disable it okay i want it off for now although it's right now connected to that default switch i'm going to disable it because i want you to see what happens when i make some changes to the switch environment in hyper-v we do the same thing over here on my second test vm change that adapter option i'm going to disable that no more connectivity now to our hyper-v manager let's move into our hyper-v switch manager and let's manage our options what you see here is we've got our three switches the default switch which came with hyper-v we've got the one that we built called private we've got one that was called internal i'm gonna build now one called external there it is right there so i'm gonna create a virtual switch called you guessed it external and look at here what it's doing here is it's already identifying that it's going to be utilizing my network adapter of my host there's only one it's sitting right here it's my intel adapter and by default what it's going to do is have this checkbox checked which basically says allow the management operating system to share this network adapter it's not really sharing it and the verbiage there is a little bit confusing i like to think of it more as do i want my host machine to participate in this local area network that's going to be constructed the moment i apply this switch to my virtual machines if yes i leave it checked if no i disable it we'll do both so you can see the differences so let's hit apply and it warns me this change might disrupt my network connectivity it's warning me on my host let's hit yes there we go we've got a few changes everything is made a whole bunch of things happen you see my virtual machines have changed too so this is a special one we want to deal with this very carefully okay first things first let's hit okay let's go take a look at my host machine there it is look at this this is brand new that wasn't there before the v ethernet external a virtual ethernet adapter added to my host and it's called external that's what we called it this is my external virtual switch you can see my default switch is still there as is my internal switch but now i am going to work this into my world let's right click take a look at the properties first and see what we see here look at this this is a dynamic element there is no specific address assigned to this because in essence it's actually borrowing this adapter remember we married this thing to my intel adapter that's my physical interface on my host machine let's minimize this let's minimize this and let's attach this external switch to my virtual machines i'm going to go to right click my virtual machine still running i'm going to go to settings and i'm going to change this to my newly created external switch i will hit apply and do the same thing on my second virtual machine let's go to my default change that to external i'm going to hit apply now remember i specifically disabled the adapter i disabled the nic on my virtual machine so i didn't want a bunch of things happening yet until i see it so now what we've done is i have effectively connected this machine to this newly created external nic i've done the same thing for my test vm and we know that this thing was created and the check box that said let me play in this world was checked they are all going to connect to this external switch that's sitting here and they're all going to utilize my one single path out to the internet called my physical nick through my physical land out to the world still with me let's see this in action i'm going to go back to my test machine let's log in here and i'm going to resize my windows a little bit here because they kind of went all wonky on me let's set this guy up as well there we go resize again i'll just tidy this up a little bit good show okay now moment of truth what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click and i'm going to enable each of these adapters and let's see what happens fantastic look at this i was now connected i'm now connected to something called network 3 interesting and it was network 4 before i don't know if you saw that but look at this i have a couple things happen here first off i have internet connectivity on both of these machines you can still see i have internet connectivity let's minimize this and pop into my command line and take a look and see what's going on see if we can make sense of this i'm going to go to my command line option i'm going to do an ipconfig there we go now look at this look at this address there was a dynamically assigned address which is 192.168.1.75 does that look familiar that network it should let's take a look at the second machine i'm going to go mike manline with an ipconfig oh let's not put an n in there there we go this is 192.168.1.79 now if you are ahead of me you're already seeing what i'm trying to throw down here you're going to see that we have now effectively given an address to these two virtual machines from my local area network they are actually physically now connected via this external switch to my home network my local area network where did the address come from well my home router is serving as the dhcp server for my environment these guys did a discover request for their dhcp this router heard it and assigned two addresses on my local area network now if you remember my virtual ethernet adapter didn't have an address all it was trying to do was say whether this computer is playing in this environment or not are we part of the team or do we want to be separate and isolated and we left that box checked which means this is part of the network so what i've effectively done is created one great big happy local area network that includes both of my virtual machines i've got full internet connectivity to these vms and i have the ability to reach every device on my network i can verify let's go to here and i'm going to do a ping to let's ping the physical nick of my verch of my host there it is let's ping my router 0.254 awesome there we go let's ping the other virtual machine which is 0.79 presto everybody's talking everybody's connected i've brought internet connectivity and local area network connectivity to my virtual machines using an external switch okay now remember that little tick box in that virtual ethernet adapter that was important the one that said i want to share the network environment let me go show you i'm going to go to my virtual switch manager and remember on my external switch this was checked right there this allow my operating system remember i said don't think of it as sharing think of it as participating i think that's a better clearer way to understand how this is working and i've just decided by virtue of this checkbox that it is going to participate in the land now what that means is that when i go to my host machine yeah look at that i am connected to the internet i'm playing as part of the world and i can ping everything from my vms to my router and everything in between but what happens if i uncheck that box let's see i'm going to go back to my hyper-v switch manager and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to uncheck this box box unchecked let's hit apply i get a warning saying this is going to change configuration of my host adapter i'm going to click ok and let's see if we can figure out what happened okay first off the sky didn't fall everything was fine my virtual machines let's go check my virtual machines can i still ping out to each other sure okay can i ping the router yes do i still have internet connectivity let's see if i've got that yes i can still get out and i can still ping can i still ping this physical adapter 1 6 there we go 1.66 something has changed that address has been taken out of the equation and we can see why i'm going to go to my home computer now my host computer and look at this no network access so by unchecking that box what i've effectively done is i've said i don't want my host machine to participate in this external network environment in other words i did this i said you can be you can use this to talk but i don't want to play there is no longer any connectivity between my host and my virtual and local area networks now to be honest with you i can't think of very many situations where that's practical remember what i've effectively done is i've completely isolated this host machine in favor of the connectivity for my virtual machines they're the ones using this particular adapter they're the ones talking to the router they're the ones getting out to the world this host machine sitting here sad lonely completely unconnected has basically no friends so while this scenario isn't very practical let me show you another scenario that is first let's go back here and i'm going to bring my my host machine back into the environment here as i said i'm going to go back to my external switch let's apply this checkbox to that option i'm going to hit apply and i'm going to hit ok and let's see nothing has happened on my virtual machines but if i go back to my world you can see that now my host machine is now once again part of the local area network i brought it back to the words before before i unchecked that box so let me show you something that is more practical and what we're going to do in order to make that work is we're going to build a completely separate external network that is completely isolated from my host network which will allow both of them to get to the internet the way we do that everybody is by adding another network interface card let me show you another diagram to make sense of this now there's no rule that says my host machine has to have one network interface i could have multiple as many as my computer can support and the simplest way to do it is with one of these this is a usb to ethernet adapter costs about 15 bucks i can plug this into my computer and connect an ethernet cable and i will have two network interfaces now what that lets me do is i can assign a specific network interface to my host machine such as my primary one and i can attach my external network to talk to a completely separate second physical network interface let me show you first thing i got to do though is i've got to plug this in give me one second while i pause the video and we're back through the magic of video editing i was able to crawl under my desk and connect that usb to ethernet adapter and you'll see the difference right now i'm going to go back to my host machine there is my new adapter i now have a completely separate ethernet adapter path to my local area network it has its own address it is dynamically assigned from my local area network i can verify that with an ipconfig there is my second ethernet adapter right there 1.80 so my computer now has two nics 1.66 and 1.80 now because my host computer now has two separate and distinct physical network interfaces i can allocate one to be used by my host machine and i can allocate a second one the different one to be used by my virtual machines thereby separating the two of them and allowing me to treat them as independent entities to do that i'm going to go back to my hyper-v virtual switch manager right here and i'm going to select on the external switch that we built and i'm going to change the properties now in these properties i actually have a drop down menu here that lets me actually decide which physical adapter i want to allocate to my virtual machines thereby freeing up the other one for my host machine now when i built the external virtual switch i only had one adapter it was my intel gig network connection and i used that for my virtual machines but now i have two i can actually now say to the virtual machines i don't want you to use my intel adapter let's use my usb to ethernet adapter right here and i'm going to send that traffic through a completely different network interface now the cool trick to this is that i now can uncheck this box i can say i don't want my host playing in this new virtual world i want to keep them separate and i can do that because my host has an alternative path it has a dedicated network interface card that will allow it to get to the internet without depending on the same nic that my virtual machines are using so if i uncheck this box i'm going to get i'm going to get a warning it's going to warn me that something's going to change i'm going to hit yes change is being applied everything is set now my virtual machines are exiting the world via this usb 2 ethernet adapter i can hit ok i can go back to these virtual machines really quickly and i can verify that nothing has changed let's ping the router there we go i can still get there as can my second machine can i ping the internet yes i can no problem so what's going on here is that my machines are borrowing this interface adapter my usb interface heading out to the router now my host machine if i were to go take a look at my settings i still have internet so everything is still good there because it's actually using my other adapter now by virtuous doing that all we've done is isolate the traffic we're still part of the same network in this particular configuration everybody's still part of the same lan because we all go to the same router both my physical interfaces go to the same home area network but if we wanted to there's no rule that says this interface has to go to my home router as a matter of fact what i can do is i can point this interface to a completely different router or a completely different interface on my existing router which will then allow me to assign any address space i wanted completely independent of my host network what that lets me do is build two separate and distinct networks isolated from each other and i can manage them as if they are completely different worlds which they truly are my host has the connection to the home router and it is getting its address and working on this 192.168 network but if my virtual machines were connected via the interface that were taking me to a completely different place i could assign completely different addresses to this thing and operate this as a completely different network environment that's typically how we do it in a networking lab where we assign a specific nic to the virtual machines that take me to a completely different router and my host machine does not lose internet connectivity because it is connected to a different interface that goes to a completely different place two isolated networks managed by the host using external switches that was a lot hopefully you were able to stay with me through all of that what i tried to do in this video was show you the functional and conceptual differences between all four of your foundational virtual switches in a virtualized environment i hope that helped with a foundational understanding of some of these virtual switches happy networking

Channel: Troy Berg

Views: 40,603

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Id: jdk6xCNmydU

Length: 42min 40sec (2560 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022