Network Device Naming in Hyper-V

In Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 we have introduced a set of new capabilities around managing virtual network adapters.  One of the really handy ones is network device naming.  This allows you to easily differentiate between different network adapters on a single virtual machine – and to correlate them to network adapters inside the virtual machine. 

The way this works is that you can now specify a network adapter name for each virtual network adapter in Hyper-V PowerShell:

HostView You can do this when creating a new network adapter – or you can set the name on an existing network adapter.  By default this just changes the name of the network adapter as it appears in the Hyper-V user interface.

The second thing I do in the command above is set “DeviceNaming” to on.  This then exposes this information into the virtual machine so you can find the network adapter easily in the guest operating system:

GuestView

This name can be accessed in two ways.  You can look at the adapter advanced properties from the Network Connections control panel, or you can run Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty –DisplayName “Hyper-V Network Adapter Name”.

Cheers,
Ben