Need VM Network Boot disc

[phenrichs]

I Have a network boot disc. It has the right drivers in it for my cards. VM boots to the disc and loads all the protocols and drivers but is auto-detecting the AMD Am70c970A card and is only operating at 100Mbps. I am trying to ghost VMs over the network and need to be able to utilize my 4 1Gbps cards. Can someone help me figure out how to get it to use my cards. I have to tried to maually select the card but that fails.

[rollin71]

Are you using ghost to get the machines out of a vmware enviorment? I would give BartPE a try we have used it and haven't had any problems recognizing the 1gb cards on our esx servers.

[BUGCHK]

The driver shows 100 MegaBit, because that is the maximum speed of the physical card which VMware emulates. The internal connection from the virtualNIC to the virtualSwitch, however runs at CPU-speed. Are you sure that the traffic runs with 100MBit?

Sorry, you cannot connect a VM to a physicalNIC.

[phenrichs]

I dont understand. So you mean that Vmware emulates a 100 card but that doesn't matter because the speed is relative to the CPU?? Or are you telling me that the connection from the vnic to the vswitch is CPU but the vswitch to my physical card is mandated by the emulation. I am confused to what the 100 emulation has to do with anything if speed is relative to CPU. I am running dual 3.2 Xeons. I have 4 gig cards. Have you heard if they will update the emulation or does that not matter.

Here is the detail. I build a vm. I boot to ghost and take an image of it. Then when I need another one i build a dummy vm of whatever total size I need. Then I boot to ghost and lay down the image that I need and resize the partitions as necessary. I do this so that I dont have templates and snapshots hanging out on my host taking up valuable space. I have seperate network storage for all of my images that was in place before ESX and I decided it was the best way for us to go because it was what everyone is familiar with. I have tested and found that if I am not going to use templates that this is the fastest way to acheive my goal for our development environment.

Regards,

Paul

[dominic7 · Accepted solution]

What they're saying is that though the card mihgt report 100mbit, you're not limited to 100mbit in raw performance. The old VLANCE driver will report 100mbit regardless of what it's connected to, and similarly if you use the vmxnet driver it will report 1Gib/second regardless of the actual line speed. If you have gigabit connections headed to the server you should be able to pull down images over the network at gigabit speed even though it reports 100Mib. A VM can only use a single physical nic at a time though, you won't see aggregate performace ( ie 4Gib speed ).

[phenrichs]

So just to verify, this behavior will be the same whether the guest is booting to windows or to a DOS network boot disc, right? I just want to be sure because from what you have told me if I have gig cards then the vm will show 100 but behave at gig speed. So if performance is lacking it must be somewhere between the host and the image server. I think I have that right.