I started looking into Hyper-V, and learned something quick. I installed Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V on a server. Then, I used a Windows 7 client to access the host via the Hyper-V Manager. I created a virtual machine and installed an operating system, but found that I had no network connection. I had to configure the host network interfaces via the Hyper-V Manager Virtual Network Manager. Once I did this, I was able to adjust the network interface on my virtual machine to use the newly configured interface.

Installing RHEL6 on a Hyper-V server presented some new challenges as well. I was able to install the OS easily enough. The problem came when I actually tried to use it. There was no virtual network interface card driver loaded. I had to download and install the Linux Integration Services software from Microsoft. It is a 2.2MB ISO image, so you can either put it on CD/DVD, mount it from a flash drive or use it as your virtual CD drive (which I did).

From the RHEL6 VM:
# cd /media # If /media is the mount point you used.
# ./install.sh
# shutdown -r now

Now, in my case, I did a minimum install, so maybe it is different when you do a basic install, but I had to manually create the ifcfg-eth0 and network files. For now, I just wanted to get on the network, so I used a DHCP client configuration.

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
ONBOOT=yes

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1

# service network restart
or
# shutdown -r now
or
# ifup eth0