Download NVSPBind for Hyper-V

The Network Virtual Service Provider Bind is a free command line tool made available for download to customers running the company’s hypervisor. NVSPBind, for short, is designed to offer customers running core installations of Microsoft’s server operating system the same options as the network control panel, when it comes down to disabling and enabling protocol bindings. Only the full installs of Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server come with the network connections applet in the control panel (ncpl.cpl). Whereas ncpl.cpl can be leveraged to enable and disable protocols from a network adapter in a full install of Windows Server, NVSPBind enable administrators to do the same, but using only the command line for the parent partition for Hyper-V in a server core environment.

“Until now, Hyper-V administrators using Server Core installs of Windows Server 2008 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server were unable to enable and disable protocol bindings from the parent partition due to the lack of a graphical network control panel only available in full installs of Windows Server,” explained Paul Despe, a program manager on the Microsoft Hyper-V team. “I'm pleased to announce one of our developers on the Hyper-V team, Keith Mange, recently addressed this gap with the release of his (previously Microsoft internal-only) networking tool NVSPBIND.EXE publicly on.”

NVSPBind, put together by Keith Mange from the Hyper-V team, is set up to correct the lack of the ncpl.cpl applet in server core deployments of Windows Server, and to add part of its functionality to the command line. The tool will, of course, change network configurations, and admins playing with it will need to tread carefully as they risk cutting network connectivity altogether.

Mange enumerated the options available with NVSPBind:

“-n display NIC information only,
-u unbind switch protocol from specified nic(s),
-b bind switch protocol to specified nic(s),
-d disable binding of specified protocol from specified nic(s),
-e enable binding of specified protocol to specified nic(s),
-r repair bindings on specified nic(s).”