Hyper-V Virtual Switches
Types of Virtual Switches
External – This type of switch is bound to the physical network cards located in the host. As you would imagine, they provide VMs located on these switches with access to the physical network the Hyper-V host is connected to. The External switch can also share management traffic as well as VM traffic on the same switch and this is one of the options that can be set when creating the external switch.
Internal – This switch is not bound to a physical network card so only allows traffic between VMs and the host itself. However, a new addition to the Internal switch functionality in 2016 is the addition of the NAT forwarding internal switch which does allow external connectivity via NAT from the Hyper-V host.
Private – This type of switch is only used for virtual machines to communicate with each other. This type of switch might be useful for certain specific types of traffic such as cluster network if only using one host as it can’t be utilized between hosts.