VDI Deployment Error About Virtual Switch

Today in class, we were testing out virtual desktop infrastructure deployment (VDI). Microsoft's VDI infrastructure is designed to allow users to have virtual desktops. Due to the restraints of our classroom environment all of the computers were unplugged from the network. As a consequence, in Hyper-V the external network was not up. This resulted in the following error during the creation of a collection:

Server computer.domain.com either does not have a virtual switch configured or none of the configured virtual switches have an IP address assigned

In our environment the computers all had the same external IP address and could not be reconnected to the network at the same time. The simplest short term solution was to connect each computer to a small switch that had no other connectivity. This brought up the link light on the external NIC and allowed the creation of the collection to complete.

This is unlikely to be a concern in any type of real life environment because those will have the external NIC connected at all times. However, it may occur when you are in a test environment and are trying to isolate from the production environment.