Users Guide

Configuring the Virtual Network 39
Setting Up the VM and Configuring the Guest
Operating System.
The following represent Dell's best practices for setting up and configuring
VMs in a Hyper-V environment while running on Dell systems.
The recommendations presented here assume the host Hyper-V environment
has already been configured using the best practice recommendations
mentioned earlier in this document. Also, these recommendations assume
that the VMs have some connectivity to other VMs, the parent partition,
and/or the external network environment. If no connectivity is required,
these steps are not needed.
Setting up the VM Network Environment
When a VM is created, Hyper-V, by default, presents the VM with a synthetic
virtual network adapter. This adapter tightly integrates with the Hyper-V
VMBus, as discussed in "The Virtual Network Architecture for Hyper-V Server
2008" on page 9, to provide high performance while minimizing resource
overhead. Due to its tight integration with the virtualization microkernel, a
special driver must be utilized with this synthetic adapter. For more
information on the driver installation, see "Setting Up the Network Driver for
the Guest Operating System" on page 40.
In all situations, except special situations such as PXE booting, you must use
the higher performing synthetic network adapter instead of the legacy
network adapter. When used in conjunction with the Integration Services
discussed in "Setting Up the Network Driver for the Guest Operating System"
on page 40, the synthetic network adapter offers the best performance.