I quickly got to the point where I realized that to do this I needed at least two LAN adapters as one should be reserved for the host itself and the other will be used for the virtual servers that are set up on the host.
As I only had PCI Express expansion slots available I ended up picking up a TP-Link Wireless N for $19 which I thought was ok.
When I tried to install the drivers from the cd that accompanied the adapter I got the error message in the screen shot below.
This was not unexpected as the driver was not supported on any server OS according to the manual however I was hoping to be able to somehow be able to manually install the driver or find a different driver that would work with Windows 2012 Server.
When I opened Device Manager I noticed that it seemed like Windows 2012 Server had identified the new adapter and installed a suitable driver already. However the message in the Device Status field seemed to indicate that there was still an issue and the adapter was not available under Network Connections in Network and Sharing Center.
Google to the rescue...
After about 3 minutes of googling I found a post by Christophe on the TP-Link tech support forum.
Christophe had tried to get a TP-Link wireless adapter working on Windows 2008 Server and run into similar problems as I was now experiencing.
It turns out that the Wireless LAN Service is disabled on Windows 2008/2012 Server but fortunately it is pretty easy to turn it back on.
In Server Manager click on Add roles and features.
In the Before you begin window click the Next button.
In the Select installation type window make sure the option for Role-based or feature-based installation is selected and click the Next button.
In the Select destination server window select the server you want to enable the Wireless LAN Service for and click the Next button.
In the Select server roles window click the Next button.
In the Select feature window check Wireless LAN Service and then click the Next button.
In the Confirm installation selections window check the Restart the destination server automatically if requred option and click the Next button. Note that since installing the Wireless LAN Service requires a reboot (this was not the case for Windows 2008 Server) and then click the Install button. The server will reboot and when you log back in again the Wireless LAN adapters should work.
Worth noting is that there is a disturbing report of incompatibility with the Wireless LAN Service if you are using the i7 CPUs and running host raid iRST. It is unclear if this has been solved by now as the only reported incident was back in May 2012. See link below.
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