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This post is going to be the toughest one to write as virtual networking, called Hyper-V Networking by Microsoft,  is something that I haven’t had a lot of time to work with. It’s clear that Microsoft are heavily invested in Software Defined Networking (SDN) as quite a bit of work has been done in the R2 releases of Windows Server 2012 and System Center VMM 2012.

An overall theme to Microsoft’s work with SDN (and 2012 R2 in general, for that matter) is that of the three clouds; the Private Cloud, the Service Provider Cloud and Azure. They all need to work in harmony, requiring as little effort from the customer as possible to get up and running.

If we start with Windows Server 2012 R2 there’s a new teaming mode called “Dynamic” that chops up the network flow into what Microsoft calls flowlets in order to be able to distribute the load of one continuous flow over multiple team members.

Hyper-V Networking (HNV) is now supported on a network team.

NVGRE, the technique used in Windows Server to implement network virtualization, can be offloaded to network cards with this feature. VMQ in combination with NVGRE will only work on NICs with the NVGRE task offload capability.

HNV is now a more integral part of a Hyper-V virtual switch which allows third-party extensions to see traffic flow from both consumer addresses (CA) as well as provider addresses (PA). HNV now also dynamically learns about new addresses in CA which means that 2012 R2 supports both DHCP servers as well as guest clusters on a virtualized network.

On that note it’s worth mentioning that the basic version of Cisco’s extension of the Hyper-V switch, called 1000V, is completely free to download and use – essentially turning your Hyper-V switch into a Cisco switch.

The Hyper-V switch has improved ACL and can now be set on port as well as on IP. In addition to this it’s also stateful.

A virtual machine can now use RSS inside the actual VM. This is called vRSS.

Microsoft was keen to point out that there had been a lot of work done in order to make SDN not only perform better but als easier to troubleshoot. There’s a new Powershell cmdlet called TestNetConnection that is ping, traceroute and nslookup all rolled into one and 2012 R2 allows you to ping a PA by using “ping -p”

In addition to this there’s a new Powershell cmdlet that allows you to test connectivity between VMs on the CA space.

2012 R2 boasts a replacement for the tried and true NetMon, called Message Analyzer. This new tool allows you, among a lot of other things, to in near real time monitor network traffic on a remote host.

There’s a built-in multi-tenant gateway between CA and PA in 2012 R2 that should be able to scale up to 100 tenants. IPAM in Windows Server 2012 R2 can now handle guest networks and can be integrated with VMM 2012 R2.

Continuing on with VMM 2012 R2 there is now support for managing top-of-rack switches from within VMM through the OMI standard. So far only Arista has announced support for this but other hardware vendors should follow. Look for the Microsoft certification logo.

This allows for a number of interesting features in VMM, one that was demonstrated was the ability to inspect the configuration of a switch and if needed remedy it from within VMM.

I’m not sure how many of my customers that can use all these features, and SDN in particular, but hopefully I’ll be able to experiment with this in my lab sometime this autumn in order to get some more experience with it.