In a previous blog post, I talked about configuring my laptop to run Hyper-V and enabling my wireless network adapter to work within a virtual machine. While it may have worked for me in the past, I noticed one day that my wireless no longer worked inside my virtual machine. I tried to figure out what could have been wrong – disabling and re-enabling the network adapter in the virtual machine and on the host machine, creating a new virtual network adapter, etc. – even creating a new virtual machine that had the wireless adapter bridged to it but that didn’t work either. Finally, after much investigation, I noticed that the bridge itself got disabled (the screenshot shows the bridge after getting re-enabled).

When you configure your network cards to be bridged, Windows creates another network adapter which now acts as a router that routes traffic from one network adapter to the other. I saw that mine got disabled so I simply re-enabled it. Immediately after doing this, wireless network traffic started to work. I realized that the only thing I did in my Hyper-V environment before it happened was to install Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.  While searching for similar occurrences, I found this post on a forum but talks about a Windows Server 2008 R2 guest in a VirtualBox environment.

It’s something to watch out for when installing Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.