broken virtual network adapters or enhanced reporting? (unidentified network)

After upgrading to 11 it seems a few of my virtual adapters are orphaned somehow and im wondering what my options are for fixing this? I have an additional network showing up now dubbed "Unidentified network" that is showing and populated by my virtualbox & vmware virtual network adapters.

something i can do to address this short of uninstalling/reinstalling vmware & virtualbox?

Sounds like the VM folks may need to chime in on this - but are your actualy VMs working (other than network access)?

yes they do work, oddly enough i even installed virtualbox and vmware ON a windows 11 VM and the result was the same. the network adapters showing up as unidentified.

makes me wonder if this is a new/innate windows 11 thing or a windows 11 bug or what? basically need other people that use vmware and/or virtualbox and windows 11 to chime in on what theyre seeing.

So, is everything working in the VM except the Passthrough for the native network adaptors? If so then It could be that the install of win11 in the VM does not have suitable drivers - don't know much about Virtualbox but you could try adjusting the VM's virtual network settings to emulate a generic/older network adaptor

no they actually HAVE web connection (the vm's) via the default. I'm shaky on the specifics but i believe its shared network access with the host but with their own IP.

unsure how to test those adapters that are added upon install by default but they never showed up outside of viewing them in "network connections"

in windows 10 it looks like this



no idea what changed with the networking stack in 11, but vmware and virtualbox are big players and with windows 11 launch being so close i dont imagine its a driver issue.

i almost attributed it to an upgrade bug/breaking things until i tried on a clean win11 install in a vm and got the same result.

if someone can confirm thats what theyre seeing on their own pc then i'll feel better leaving it as is. at that point its either intentional in the categorizing/labeling, or something that is in fact broken that will require someone whos not me to fix

I cannot see any bug or issue here.

As far as I know, VBox and VMware virtual network adapters are never offering Internet connection to virtual host computer. As far as host is concerned, they are (and should be) network adapters without Internet connection.

When a VM needs any of them, it is used to provice VM Internet connection, but host is still using its actual hardware adapter for connection, so those virtual adapters will still be shown on host as being without Internet connection.

Using exclusively Hyper-V for my virtualization needs. not knowing VBox and Vmware, I hope that our resident VMware expert @pparks1 checks this post, and either confirms or disproves this: There's no bug, no issue in your Windows 11 showing those adapters having no Internet connection.

Kari

I'm inclined to agree - there is not a 'problem' here, it's just that the reporting by Windows 11 is more in depth, and taking into account these extra network connections for the VMs whereas Windows 10 was (more than likely) simply ignoring them because they were virtual connections in the first place.

I think it would be nice, though, if those virtual connections could also be made private, but at the same time I think I understand why Microsoft may have chosen not to do so.

seems plausible its purely the reporting thats changed. you guys are probably right. my other pc is too old to upgrade to 11 without a full reinstall (afaik) so wont be able to test on another physical pc myself for confirmation. I'm sure someone will pop up at some point to confirm or otherwise anyways.

johnlgalt said:

I think it would be nice, though, if those virtual connections could also be made private, but at the same time I think I understand why Microsoft may have chosen not to do so.

Click to expand...

It is totally, profoundly irrelevant, if those virtual adapters are showing as public or private. When used, the network on VM can always be made private. WIndows default, on host and VM, is public network.

As the VBox and VMware virtual adapters will never be used for Internet / network connection by the host, the only important thing is, that when used on VM, its connection can be switched to private.

Kari

Kari said:

It is totally, profoundly irrelevant, if those virtual adapters are showing as public or private. When used, the network on VM can always be made private. WIndows default, on host and VM, is public network.

As the VBox and VMware virtual adapters will never be used for Internet / network connection by the host, the only important thing is, that when used on VM, its connection can be switched to private.

Kari

Click to expand...

I wholeheartedly disagree. It is not irrelevant at all, as the presence of these public network adapters prevents the configuration of windows remote management on the host machine. I have the exact same issue that the OP described, however, while the virtual network adapters do what they are supposed to as far as the virtual guests are concerned, it presents a challenge when trying to configure windows remote management on the host, running "winrm quickconfig" to attempt to quickly setup and configure windows remote management results in the below errors:


This is absolutely a problem that the developers of these virtualization tools needs to resolve.

yea, just found out it also seems theyre preventing my wake on lan requests from being sent from this pc. they have a lower network interface index than my non virtual ethernet adapter yet WoL still wont work unless I disable the vmware adapters. I assume its trying to use them to send the packet somehow theyre taking priority.

perhaps due to them being pegged as "public" and i have no idea how to change the unidentified network to private so im at quite the impasse.

I'm making new VMs on my rig (though in Hyper-V) - I'll se if this turns out ot be an issue or not on my end.

been a whole lot of stink about this issue elsewhere. still nobody seems to know who to blame. breaks remote connection, breaks wake on lan, prompts for creation of public firewall rules at startup due to that network taking priority temporarily.

so far the only fix ive found is disabling/removing the adapters entirely which will break your ability to access the web from within a guest, or disconnecting them from the host network in the network configurator within workstation. this will also remove them from your list of network adapters. I have no idea the ramifications of doing so outside of windows NLA not getting cozy with them and thus things not being incredibly broken.

a force to a private network via powershell will take until restart at which point they revert to public once again fwiw. frustrating. i finally gave in and gave up many years of configuration to update cleanly/fresh to windows 11. getting even remotely set back up for my workflow is going to be a long process that i didnt expect after microsoft touting windows 10 as being the "last" windows.

I want to do so with minimal under the hood tinkering but things like this necessitate it right off the bat