SCVMM - Concepts and Configuration

This documentation exists to remind us of how we implemented the networking model in SCVMM 2016 - but using 2012 R2 documentation because we couldn't find reasonable documentation for 2016.

Concepts

"One key point is to ideally perform all your configuration through SCVMM for your Hyper-V host. Don't create virtual switches, don't create NIC teams, don't start creating virtual machines. The best experience is to define the configuration in SCVMM and let it perform all the configuration on the hosts.

In the order considered, we have the following architectural components:

  1. Logical Network
    1. A Network Site
  2. Logical Switch
  3. VM Networks
  4. Port Classifications

Logical Network

The first architectural component for SCVMM is the Logical Network. It models your physical network infrastructure and connectivity in SCVMM. Logical Networks are often given purposes: E.g. Management, Internet, DMZ. Do not think of a logical network as being in one place, it can span many "sites" or it can span just one.

The logical network is modeling the physical network so it is important that your objects match the physical topology, such as the correct IP and VLAN configuration!

A Network Site in a logical network may reflect location, but more specifically identifies a set of network configurations. I.e. VLAN and IP subnet - although we don't use a subnet at all! Instead we use MAC pools in SCVMM and DHCP outside of SCVMM.

We named our Logical Network VLANS Network because we have a network of VLANS all attached to a router/firewall which takes care of all routing between VLANs.

Logical Network: VLANs Network

Each one of these VLANs is isolated from each of the other ones by a firewall so we identify this as:

VLAN-based independent networks.

The site is simply the SOC or school of computing site. Within that site we have several VLANs with no assigned subnets.

Site: SOC

VLANs include: