Networking and Hyper-V – Part I: Mapping the OSI Model
After storage, Hyper-V’s next most confusing subject is networking. There are a dizzying array of choices and possibilities. To make matters worse, many administrators don’t actually understand that much about the fundamentals because, up until now, they’ve never really had to.
Why It Matters
In the Windows NT 4.0 days, the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer exam track required passage of “Networking Essentials” and the electives included a TCP/IP exam. Neither of these exams had a corollary in the Windows 2000 track and, although I haven’t kept up much with the world of certification since the Windows 2003 series, I’m fairly certain that networking has largely disappeared from Microsoft certifications. That’s both a blessing and a curse. Basic networking isn’t overly difficult and a working knowledge can be absorbed through simple hands-on experience. More advanced, and sometimes even intermediate skills, can be involved and require a fair level of dedication.
If all you really need to do is plug a Windows Server into an existing network and get it going, then a lot of that is probably excess detail that you can leave to someone else. There are certification, expertise, and career tracks available just for networking, and the network engineers and administrators that earn them deserve to have their own world separate from system engineering and administration. Learning all of that is burdensome for systems administrators and is unlikely to pay dividends, especially with the risk of skill rot. The downside is that it’s no longer good enough to know how to set up a vendor team and slam in some basic IP information. Too many systems people have ignored the networking stacks in favor of their servers and applications and are now playing catch-up as integrated teaming, datacenter bridging, software-defined networking, and other technologies escape the confines of netops and intrude into the formerly tidy world of sysops.
The first post of this series will (re)introduce you to the fundamentals of networking that you will build the rest of your Hyper-V networking understanding upon.
