How to Present a new NIC to an Isolated VM (ARM)

Symptoms:

  • Disabled Network Interface Card from inside the OS
  • Disabled DHCP by manually assigning an IP address inside the OS
  • Manually set the VM to use a DNS server by specifying an IP address

Resolution:

  1. Navigate to the Azure Portal
  2. Select the affected Virtual Machine
  3. Select Network Interfaces
  4. Select the Network Interface associated with your machine
    1
  5. Select IP configurations
  6. Select the IP
    2
  7. Set the Private IP address as STATIC if you do not have it set that way already
  8. Change the IP address to another IP that is available in that subnet. Such as 10.0.0.12 to 10.0.0.13 and select Save
    3
  9. Your virtual machine will restart to initialize the new NIC to the system
  10. Attempt to RDP to your machine
  11. If successful, you can change the Private IP address back to the original if you would like.
  12. Once inside the machine check for Ghost NICs
  13. Open up Device Manager
    2
  14. Select View -> Show hidden devices
  15. Select Network Adapters
  16. Here you should see some adapters called "Microsoft Hyper-V Network Adapter
  17. You might see one with that name that is greyed out
    3
  18. If you do such as in the picture above, select to uninstall it
    4

NOTE: Only uninstall GREYED out adapters that have the name Microsoft Hyper-V Network Adapter #_
If you uninstall any of the other hidden adapters it could cause additional issues