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After upgrading to windows 10 v1511, the Hyper-V switch I had has gone all over the place.

Aside from being disabled, and not being able to start, the network connections manager shows the switch with a different name "Ethernet 2" (description says it is a hyper-v switch). When I try to remove the switch via the Hyper-V manager I get the Error:

Failed while removing virtual Ethernet switch. Internal miniport delete  failed, internal NIC = 'somenicidthatstoolong': Invalid parameter (0x80041008)". The switches name is "vEthernet".

Since that does not work, I tried removing the vmswitch through PowerShell.

remove-vmswitch -Name "vEthernet" -force
remove-vmswitch -Name "Ethernet 2" -force

Both of these grant me another error:

remove-vmswitch : Hyper-V was unable to find a virtual switch with name "vEthernet".
remove-vmswitch : Hyper-V was unable to find a virtual switch with name "Ethernet 2".

Since none of these are working, I tried to list all of the VMSwitches using get-vmswitch...which returned nothing.

So in the end we are left with a nonexistant vmswitch, that exists in the hyper-v manager still, and also in Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections with a different name.

How do I remove these entries so I can create a new VMSwitch?

3 Answers 3

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Alright, so for anyone else who has this issue here is the solution.

DISCLAIMER: YOU WILL MOST LIKELY LOSE NETWORK CONNECTIVITY ON THE HOST PC/SERVER UNTIL THE FINAL STEP

Since you cannot remove/uninstall the Hyper-V switch through

Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections

The only choice left is to open the device manager.

Device Manager > Your PC > Network adapters

In this list you will find the Hyper-V Switch, but it will most likely NOT have the name you gave it. Determine which network switch is the Hyper-V Switch, right click and uninstall it. This is where network connectivity will be lost.

After uninstalling the switch from the device manager, the record will still be left in your Hyper-V Manager's Virtual Switch Manager. However, rejoice, as now that the device has been manually removed you can now remove the virtual switch from the Virtual Switch Manager without error.

Now, when configuring a Hyper-V Switch, the actual physical adapter is set as a Hyper-V Extensible Switch. Since we manually removed the adapter, the Virtual Switch Manager did NOT restore the switch to its original settings. Go back to

Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections

and right click on your primary network adapter, hit properties, and uncheck the "Hyper-V Extensible Virtual Switch". After doing so, you should see the other checkboxes populate automatically, if it doesn't for some reason, go through them and check what you need.

Hit OK, confirm the notice that will say you may experience network interruption, and you are back to having internet on your PC/Server and are now able to Re-create your Virtual Switch for your Hyper-V Virtual Machines.

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I also had this issue. After removing the virtual switch, I still could not add a new external virtual switch. I had to uninstall the Hyper-V component from add/remove components, reboot, install the Hyper-V component from add/remove components, reboot, and then I could add an external virtual switch.

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  • I just upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10 and had the same issue. I had to remove Hyper-V and reinstall it. Dec 29, 2017 at 20:47
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...and on my PC, I couldn't even remove Hyper-V, after reboot: failed to ocnfigure.. undoing changes. Had to roll back to 10240, at least roll back worked like a charm.

note: I used 10586.14 to upgrade but a colleague could solve this way with 10586.3 (original RTM of v1511).

Bummer, since win8.1 - win10 10240 upgrade was fine :(

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