Setting Up New Networking Features in Server 2016

I've been playing around with Server 2016 and the ViaMonstra Hydration Kit for ConfigMgr.  If you want your lab environment to be able to connect to the internet, you know (if you've been reading our books) that you need to setup a virtual router.  In Kent's book (System Center 2012 R2: Mastering the Fundamentals), we actually walk you through setting up a very complex environment that requires you to use our "GW01" or a Vyatta virtual router in order for your lab to get out to the internet.

In Server 2016 (and Windows 10),  there is a new feature called NAT network which allows you to get your VMs out to the internet without the need to setup a virtual router.  Below are the PowerShell commands to do the setup *based on the ViaMonstra environment*.  If you use our hydration kit and customize it for your environment, you'll need to customize what's below to match your unique configuration.

Note: If your Hyper-V host is using the same address space as the NAT-enabled virtual switch, you need to change one of them. For example, having your home network (and your Hyper-V Lab Host) both using the 192.168.1.0 address space will not work.

New-VMSwitch -SwitchName "ViaMonstraNAT" -SwitchType Internal
New-NetIPAddress -IPAddress 192.168.1.1 -PrefixLength 24 -InterfaceAlias "vEthernet (ViaMonstraNAT)"
New-NetNat -Name ViaMonstraNATNetwork -InternalIPInterfaceAddressPrefix 192.168.1.0/24

Once the switch is created, simply configure the virtual machines to use it.

 
DC01 from the hydration kit configured to use the new switch.

If you want more info, please visit Thomas Maurer's blog, it's very shiny.

Thanks for reading

/Ami