Russ' Do It Yourself Home Workshop

I’ve got a Windows 2008 R2 server that I’m running Virtual Server 2008 R2 on and, after a hard drive upgrade this past weekend, all my physical to virtual network connections were lost (broken).  Looking at my "external network" defined in Virtual Server, I found that the physical network adapter was set to "None (Guests Only)."

Taking the advice of Ben Armstrong, Virtual PC Guy, I uninstalled the Virtual Machine Network Services on my physical server’s NIC, rebooted and then reinstalled the Virtual Machine Network Services.  I was saddened when I looked and saw that the physical NICs were still not showing up in the drop down list.

However, I had one last trick to try before another reboot.  I opened the services applet and stopped/restarted the Virtual Server and Virtual Machine Helper services.

Then I went back to look at my list of physical NICs.  They were all there!  Networking is now back to normal.

Update 2010-06-24:

Had this happen again so I simply stopped and restarted VS from services.msc.  The state of my running VMs was saved and the network returned without removing and re-adding the Virtual Machine Network Services.  Networking was restored.  Now, if I can only determine why this is happening.