Will SCVMM 2025 be able to use and manage SDN Network Controller deployed as native Failover Cluster resource

James Jensen 1 Reputation point
2026-07-15T20:09:30.05+00:00

Building out our new Hyper-V environments. We will use Windows 2025 Datacenter hosts/cluster, with SCVMM 2025 management. We want to use SDN and everything points to deploying native on the failover cluster, but it doesn't look like SCVMM 2025 will support SDN unless it is deployed the traditional way from a service template on 3 VMs.

Is this true? Is SCVMM support for native clustered SDN network controller on the way?

Windows for business | Windows Server | Storage high availability | Clustering and high availability
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  1. Chen Tran 12,770 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2026-07-15T22:25:06.72+00:00

    Hello James,

    Thank you for posting question on Microsoft Windows Forum!

    Well! The fact of the matter is that as of SCVMM 2025, it does NOT support managing the "Native" (Host-Clustered) SDN Network Controller. To use SDN with SCVMM 2025 today, you must deploy the Network Controller as a traditional Guest VM workload (three VMs) via the SCVMM Service Template.

    There are two distinct deployment models for SDN Network Controller. For Guest-VM Based (Traditional). Network Controller runs on top of the Hyper-V cluster as a guest workload. SCVMM orchestrates the deployment via a service template. This is the ONLY model SCVMM 2025 supports. For Host-Native (Clustered), on the other hand, Network Controller runs directly within the Hyper-V host OS (as a clustered role, similar to a Scale-Out File Server). It is managed natively via PowerShell, WAC (Windows Admin Center), or directly through the cluster. If you attempt to deploy a Native clustered NC and import it into SCVMM, SCVMM will either fail discovery or throw errors about unsupported fabric roles. SCVMM's fabric database expects the NC service to be tied to specific guest VM objects, not to host-level clustered roles.

    For the time being, you can consider to proceed with service template deployment for SDN in SCVMM 2025. Since Microsoft has not indicated that SCVMM will support native clustered NC deployment in future updates. However, it is recommended to constantly monitor Microsoft Learn & SCVMM release notes for any future announcements regarding native clustered NC support.

    You can consult the following articles for further reference.

    Hope the above information is helpful!

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