Richard Siddaway's Blog

Virtualisation is a great technique for creating demo labs. I took my laptop with a bunch of VMs of Windows 8/Server 8 to the PowerShell Deep Dive.  Normally I run my “server” laptop and my development laptop on a switch or connected via a cross over cable. The VM nics are bound to the “server” laptops real ethernet NIC.

This don’t work when you ( a ) forget the cross over cable and ( b ) have the battery collapse on the dev box. I needed to swap the VMs to run off the internal private Hyper-V network.  Swapping the nics between virtual switches is easy but its a pain when you need to do a number of them.

Time for a couple of functions

function set-loopbackswitch {            
            
Get-VM |            
foreach {            
 $nic = Get-VMNIC -VM $_ |             
 where{$_.SwitchName -eq "Local Area Connection - Virtual Network"}             
 Set-VMNICSwitch -NIC $nic -Virtualswitch "LoopBack"            
}            
}            
            
function set-realswitch {            
Get-VM |            
foreach {            
 $nic = Get-VMNIC -VM $_ |             
 where{$_.SwitchName -eq "LoopBack"}             
 Set-VMNICSwitch -NIC $nic -Virtualswitch "Local Area Connection - Virtual Network"            
}            
}

These get the virtual machines and get the nics corresponding to the appropriate switch. It then swaps the the nic to the other switch. Created as 2 functions as its quicker to write.

The functions are based on James O’Neill’s Hyper-V library – if you haven’t got it it is on codeplex