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For USM Anywhere to monitor traffic from your physical network, you need to send a copy of the network traffic to the Hyper-V Sensor, as illustrated in the following diagram:

Illustration for Directing Network Traffic from Your Physical Network to the Hyper-V Sensor

Important: USM Anywhere provides multiple network interfaces to monitor your network. To avoid duplicating data, you should not connect them all to the same virtual switch. Instead, you can connect each interface to a different virtual switch dedicated to a different subnet within your network or a different virtual local area network (VLAN).
In the following procedure, you will configure the Hyper-V Sensor virtual machine (VM) as the destination and the virtual switch as the source of the mirrored traffic. This procedure assumes that you have completed the following tasks:
  • Enabled port mirroring on the network you want USM Anywhere to monitor.
  • Allocated a spare network interface card (NIC) to direct the mirrored traffic to the virtual switch.

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Configure a Port Mirroring Destination

When configuring your Hyper-V Sensor to capture mirrored traffic, you need to set the appropriate network adapter on the Hyper-V Sensor VM as the destination for port mirroring. To configure your Hyper-V Sensor to capture mirrored traffic
  1. Open the Microsoft Hyper-V Manager and right-click the Hyper-V Sensor VM.
  2. Select Settings.
  3. Expand the available network adapter and select Advanced Features.
    Note: Network adapter 1 is reserved for the management interface. See Configure Network Interfaces for On-Premises Sensors for more information.
  4. Scroll to the Port mirroring section and set the Mirroring mode to Destination.
  5. Click Apply.
  6. In the same network adapter, select Hardware Acceleration and uncheck Enable virtual machine queue. If virtual machine queue (VMQ) is enabled on the associated network adapter, the Hyper-V Sensor is not able to detect any mirrored traffic.
  7. Click Apply and then OK.

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Configure the Port Mirroring Source

To complete the port mirroring configuration in Hyper-V, you need to specify the source of the mirrored traffic. In our case, this is the virtual switch connected to your spare NIC.
Note: For the virtual switch to monitor network traffic, you must enable the Microsoft Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) Capture extension on the switch.
To set up the virtual switch as the port mirroring source
  1. Open the Microsoft Windows PowerShell console.
  2. Enter the following: 
    $a = Get-VMSystemSwitchExtensionPortFeature -FeatureId 776e0ba7-94a1-41c8-8f28-951f524251b5

$a.SettingData.MonitorMode = 2

add-VMSwitchExtensionPortFeature -ExternalPort -SwitchName \<virtual_switch_name> -VMSwitchExtensionFeature $a
Important: Be aware that if you enable promiscuous mode for a physical port, it directs all the traffic received on that port toward the VM destination.

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Additional Configurations for Port Mirroring Setup from VLAN Traffic

If your environment uses a VLAN to route traffic, you will also need to configure Microsoft Hyper-V to accept packets from the designated VLAN identifier (ID) range. To set up VLAN port mirroring
  1. In Hyper-V Guest, create a NIC designated as “management” using the following PowerShell command: 
    Add-VMNetworkAdapter -VMName \<VirtualMachineName> -Name "Management"
  2. Add the port you will use as a mirror. For example: 
    Add-VMNetworkAdapter -Vmname \<VirtualMachineName> -name "Mirror"
    If you have multiple NICs you are mirroring, repeat this step for each NIC.
  3. Add the VLAN ID ranges to be mirrored. For example: 
    Set-VMNetworkAdapterVlan -VMName VIRTUALMACHINENAME -VMNetworkAdapterName "mirror" -trunk -allowedvlanidlist \<VLAN-ID-Range> -nativevlanid \<VLAN-ID-Range>
Important: The NIC needs to be created, named, and tagged with VLAN ID ranges as a guest in Microsoft Hyper-V. If the NIC is not named and tagged properly, it can create errors in the guest system.

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