Hyper-V hosts that participate in a specific virtual network. The supported solution,
and really the only practical way, is to use the virtualization management solution to
manage the virtual networks and not to do it manually using PowerShell, which
means using System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Referring to the planes required for network virtualization to work will help you
understand the criticality of SCVMM with HNVv1 and how things are changing with
HNVv2 in Windows Server 2016. Whereas SCVMM can be considered “not essential”
for some areas of Hyper-V where the end result could still be achieved, albeit with far
more work and customization, this is not the case for network virtualization that
needs SCVMM. These planes are shown in Figure 3.32.
Figure 3.32 The three planes that enable network virtualization for HNVv1
Data Plane Packets are encapsulated and decapsulated for communication over
the wire on the data plane. This is implemented by the Hyper-V VM Switch and
leverages NVGRE for the encapsulation.
Control Plane Controls how configuration is propagated to the networking
equipment and the Hyper-V servers. This is handled efficiently by Hyper-V and
SCVMM by using SCVMM as a central policy store, which is then used by the
Hyper-V servers, avoiding large amounts of network “chatter” related to control
traffic. This provides a scalable solution. As changes occur, such as to which host a
virtual machine is hosted on, SCVMM, as that central policy store, can notify all
Hyper-V hosts affected in real time.
Management Plane The network is configured and managed on the
management plane. This is SCVMM using its management tool and SCVMM
PowerShell cmdlets.Windows Server 2016 still has the same three planes, but their implementation is
different and is inspired by the Azure SDN implementation. Inspired may be too light