Network Adapter issues with Windows 2008 R2 templates

[beckhamk]

Hello all,

I have had a heck of a day trying to get a Windows 2008 R2 template to work properly.

I basically created a brand new vm and installed windows 2008 R2 data center on the vm. Using pvscsi and vmxnet3 for the nics.

vmware tools installed and using the wddm video driver. The vm itself runs fine, its only the vm that is deployed from the template that has the nic issues.

First issue is that the template has the following nics:

- Local Area Connection

- Local Area Connection 2

After deploying the vm from this template (using a customization spec through vcenter) we now get nics:

- Local Area Connection 3

- Local Area Connection 4

We have plently of windows 2008 standard 32bit and 64bit and dont have this problem at all.

The second issue is that I can deploy 2 vm's one right after each other from this same template and get the nics as:

- Local Area Connection 3

- Local Area Connection 4

One vm will get: Local Area Connection 3 = WAN and Local Area Connection 4 = LAN and the other vm gets: Local Area Connection 3 = LAN and Local Area Connection 4 = WAN. All while the template has NIC1 = LAN vlan and NIC2 = WAN vlan.

This makes no sense to use. Is anyone else experiencing this issue? BTW: I also through maybe the template install was bad. So i deleted and recreated it a second time and got the same results. I am thinking this is an isolated issue for R2 as we havent seen this on non R2 2008 vm's.

[beckhamk]

Hello all,

We opened a SR with vmware and found out this is a known issue. Response below.... Its amazing to me that vmware certified that R2 works with vmware but yet such a simple test proves that there quality control department is not doing its job.

The issue that you are observing is a known issue with Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

The issue occurs because e1000 is a PCI device while vmxnet3 is a PCI Express device. W2K8R2/Win7 track PCI devices by which slot the device is plugged into, so moving the device (e.g., during a VM hardware upgrade) causes Windows to allocate a new set of settings for the NIC. PCI Express devices are tracked by their serial number, which is derived from the MAC address. When you provision a new VM the MAC address changes, so the serial number changes, so Windows thinks it's a new NIC.

Now the answers to your questions:

1) I am recommending e1000, as the through put of both the devices are same, until you want to use few additional features available with vmxnet3 like Jumbo Frames. Also the PR that I am referring to talks about vmxnet3 drivers and not vmxnet2. Also I think vmxnet2 driver should work fine.

2)We still don't have a KB article published for the same, but I have passed on the information to our KB team and they will soon publish the KB article.

3)We still don't have any ETA for the same, as the problem is still under investigation.

Currently the only work around available is to use e1000 instead of vmxnet3.