Routing in my Hyper-V lab

I wrote recently about my failure to anticipate the heavy workload that would be necessary to run a particular workload under VMware Workstation on my desktop PC, which proved to be sorely underpowered. So, in an effort to make things a bit better, I decided to simply move everything to my Hyper-V-based lab. However, one area in which Workstation is far superior to Hyper-V is in its handling of virtual networks. It’s really easy under Workstation 8 to create a virtual network that basically uses the host as a router and DHCP server so that you can create a fully isolated network. It’s not so easy under Hyper-V. So, I worked around it by building what will be a permanent fixture in my lab: A Windows Server 2008 R2 server with Routing and Remote Access installed. This will provide me with an easy means to isolate workloads in my lab from the rest of my home network. For example, the project I’m working on right now doesn’t like seeing a DHCP server out on the network but Internet connectivity is required. I don’t want to have to reconfigure my entire home network every time I need to do something like this, so this Windows-based software router is a welcome addition!