Hyper-V Advice - Virtual Network Switch?

Hi all,

I am currently trying out Hyper-V 2012 for the first time and I am just trying to get my head around the virtual switch config.

Basically I have a server 2012 R2 machine which has one physical network port which I need to configure a static IP address too.

Now every time I create a "external" network switch for my VM's the physical adapter on the Hyper V server seems to change to a virtual switch and loses all the IP settings I configured earlier which makes my Hyper-V server unreachable, is this normal?

A new network card is also created, am I right to think this is a virtual network card and I should configure the static IP settings under this card now instead of the physical network card?

Thanks in advance

Mac