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I have a Windows 8.1 pro host and an 8.1 pro VM. I'm using an external virtual switch to allow the VM to connect to the network and get internet connectivity.

When this works, all is dandy and I can RDP into it and all is good in the world. However, it is extremely fragile.

Seemingly when I switch wifi networks (from work to home) or my laptop hibernates, either the VM will lose connectivity or the host will. This is generally followed by an hour or so of removing/recreating various configurations of virtual switches, disabling/enabling various network adapters until almost by chance it starts to work again.

Is there any definitive "right" way to deal with this?

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  • May not be relevant, but in playing around I'm noticing there's a first-come-first-served on a valid IP address. Currently either the host or the VM gets it and that is the machine which has network access, when the vm doesnt it has some 169.xxx address. I can force it one way or the other by disabling/re-enabling network adapters. Is this a DHCP issue and could it be something to do with the lease offered by the router? Complete guess, probably a red-herring...
    – DannyT
    Commented Mar 25, 2014 at 22:58
  • Issue seems to only be present on home wifi. Both networks configured with DHCP but are on different ranges. Could this perhaps be a router issue?
    – DannyT
    Commented Mar 26, 2014 at 21:09

1 Answer 1

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Work around fix: Disable then re-enable the Network Bridge

I have had this similar issue repeatedly when moving from work network to home wifi.

My Setup:

  • Windows 8.1 pro host

  • Win 7 VM.

  • External virtual switch to allow the VM to connect to the network and get internet connectivity.

When creating the external virtual switch it creates a Network Bridge in "Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections"

If I successfully RDP in then logout the next attempt to RDP in fails with a can't find computer error message, various attempts to reboot host and VM did nothing.

Solution I stumbled on was to disable then re-enable the Network Bridge in the list of adapters even while keeping the VM in a running state.

Not sure what is causing this but seems to fix it.

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  • I ditched VM as my dev build and went back to bare metal, this issue was causing me too much friction. Sometimes disabling/enabling the bridge would work, sometimes doing that to the adapter would but often neither helped and I move between networks too frequently so I just ditched it. May try again in the future though. I'll give you the cred for suggesting this though :)
    – DannyT
    Commented Aug 29, 2014 at 12:20

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