How to replace a physical router with a virtual router for colocating Windows Server 2012 machine with multiple VM’s

colocationhyper-vroutingrraswindows-server-2012

I am currently setting up a Windows Server 2012 machine that will be colocated. It will have around 10 VM's on it that allow various users to connect in and run them from home. Most of the VM's will be Windows 8 unless they are for basic testing purposes. I do have access to creating a second Windows Sever 2012 machine as a VM if needed.

The physical machine will be connected directly to the colocation service so I will have a specific static IP that I will need to use for the physical machine. I am new to networking like this and I'm having trouble figuring out how to setup either a) the physical machine with routing capability or b) setting up a VM to act as the router. In both cases I will not have the ability to put my own physical router in the location and thus need to be able to route traffic to the VM's using a virtual router.

Since I have the one public static IP I am assuming that will need to go to the physical machine and then through something like RRAS I would somehow create the equivalent of a router that could either a) assign IP's to the VM's through DHCP or b) route to static IP's that have been assigned to each VM. All the VM's will need to be able to access the internet.

I guess my question is through what I have described is it possible for me to use something that is built in to Windows Server 2012 to achieve what I want with 1 physical NIC, 1 public static IP, 1 physical server, and multiple VM's on Hyper-V? If so does anyone know of any good information on how to set this up because I keep finding information out there but in most cases there is some physical router being assumed in what I have read and thus I am stuck at the moment.

UPDATE:
I'm told by my boss that he wants to keep everything in a windows environment for various reasons of his own. I have read about using a loopback adapter with RRAS as a possible way to solve this? Does anyone know if that might work and if so how?

Thank you for any help you may provide.

Best Answer

I would suggest you run pfSense in a VM as your router. It's fairly easy to work with, and free.

Essentially though, your setup will look like this:

                      Physical box with one NIC
                  +------------------------------------------------------+
+------------+    |                                                      |
|  Internet  |{--}| {Lan Bridge} [ROUTER] {-VMLAN-} [ Virtual Machines]  |
+------------+    |                                                      |
                  +------------------------------------------------------+

Using this, all your virtual machines have a private subnet(say, 192.168.34.0/24), Your router is bridged to the World on the physical interface. and has a virtual link to the VM LAN network. Your physical system then has no direct connection using it's physical interface, and an a private address on a virtual link to the VM LAN as well.

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