Hyper-V Networking Problems

I encountered some "interesting" situations with Hyper-V networking last night. For some reason I've lost the ability to connect to network shares on my machine, not good. I poke around and find for some reason that "Client for Microsoft Networks" is disabled on the Hyper-V virtual NIC. WTF?

I try to re-enable it and get the strange error message of "Your current selection will also disable the following features: Client for Microsoft Networks"

Uh, no? I'm trying to re-enable.

It appears that I am not the only person that has had this issue:

http://sqlsolace.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html

I disabled the Hyper-V virtual NIC and re-established my physical NIC and am able to truck on down the road. I find that if I delete the Hyper-V virtual NIC (external network connection) and create an internal virtual network (no physical connection) that the internal network has Client for Microsoft Network without issue. It's only the external virtual connections that are bjorked.

In the blog post above they said that if they un-installed all protocols and clients, reboot, and then re-installed that it was a work around. What a PITA. I haven't tried that yet as I got my Ubuntu 8.04 TLS installation up and running with HAProxy load balancing to two Win2k3 VMs which for prototyping works just fine on an internal virtual network just fine.

I like HAProxy. It is pretty full featured for a free, open source L7 load balance tool. It has a lot of features that remind me of NetScaler boxes (HAProxy even has a FreeBSD port so you too can run your balancer under FreeBSD just like NetScaler, 'cept of course it isn't NetSclaer).

I fired up my Win2k3 running NLB and the NLB manager shows both client machines to be up and running but it will only direct traffic to one of the Win2k3 VMs. Nice. And even niftier, if I ping the NLB cluster (in my case, it's 192.168.0.100) I will get back dupe pings as NLB creates the 192.168.0.100 VIP on both the NLB machine and all the client machines. Yeah, NLB is over kill for the stuff I want to do and HAProxy has nifty persistence support via cookies since it is a L7 balancer.

The only issue is that IIS logs the IP address of the HAProxy machine and not the actual client IP address. The HAProxy, much like the NetScaler product, sends the true IP in an X HTTP request header but you must use an ISAPI filter with IIS to log the true IP address to the IIS log. Apache has built in support for logging X-Header entries to the apache log. That is kinda handy but we aren't using apache. I've found some sample Visual C++ 6.0 ISAPI code for handling this task. Heck, I don't even have Visual Studio 6.0 installed or even Visual C++ 2008 installed on my machine.

Meh, not going to worry about it right now. Just suffice it to say that Hyper-V networking is irking me and NLB is ooky. HAProxy is pretty nifty and didn't take long to get a sample balancer up and running.