Intel e1000 NIC Team in Windows 2008 x64 guest

[J_Wood]

I have a Windows 2008 x64 guest with four e1000 vNICs (host is BL490c with 20Gbps networking). I have found several threads discussing teaming the e1000 vNICs using the Intel PROSet software from the Intel website however when I go to install the software I get an error that no Intel NICs can be found. I have tried several different install switches with no luck.

Has anyone had a similar experience or have any suggestions?

Thanks!

JAMES WOOD | SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR | ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Phoenix, Arizona

[msemon1]

Are you trying to team the NICS at the VM guest level or at the Virtual Switch level?

Mike

[J_Wood]

I am trying to team the Intel e1000 vNICs at the VM level.

JAMES WOOD | SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR | ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

Phoenix, Arizona

[msemon1]

Why not do this at the virtual switch level? If speed and throughput is your goal then do it at the virtual switch level. What does your networking look like? Do you have trunk ports from your pSwitch to your ESX hosts?

Mike

[J_Wood]

Our network to the blade enclosure is two 10Gbe links to separate core pSwitches. We are only using the standard vSwitches, not the distributed switches. The workload we want to test is a Citrix Provisioning Server node.

How would you team these vNICs at the vSwitch level? I am not familiar with this feature...

[AWo]

There's not really a benefit from teaming virtual NIC's (and your e1000 is a virtual one at the guest level) other than testing purposes or if you bind every single vNIC to one physical NIC.

AWo
VCP / VMware vEXPERT 2009

=Due to lack of employees, human beings work here. - Treat them carefully, they are rare.=

[msemon1]

Take a look at this thread which discusses networking best practices. This should help regardless of what type server your are deploying.

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/220883

[ArevaRnD]

We have this same problem (see the original post above), and have not seen a solution yet. Anyone else?

We need multiple vNICs teamed at the VM level, to test our application with NIC failover and failback.

This worked great with ESX 3.5 and Windows 2003 guest VMs, but we are not able to load the Intel driver on Windows 2008 guests on ESXi 4 hosts.

Thanks for any help.

Areva R&D

[JasonTaylor]

I'm guessing this is because Intel doesn't have an NDIS 6.2 driver. I was able to workaround it by manually installing the 6.1 driver. Here are the steps:

1. Extract the Intel drivers to a folder: Prowinx64.exe /s /e /f "C:\temp"

2. Right-click on the network adapter and choose "Update Driver Software..."

3. Pick "Browse my computer for driver software"

4. Pick "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer"

5. Pick "Have Disk"

6. Pick "Browse..."

7. Browse to c:\temp\pro1000\winx64\ndis61\e1g6032e.inf

8. Click "Next" to install the driver.

9. Repeat steps 2-8 for each network adapter.

10. Once you have all the adapters updated, run the Intel setup program. It should now work and install the advanced network services software with VLANs, etc.

[RParker]

We have this same problem (see the original post above), and have not seen a solution yet. Anyone else?

You can't team with Intel software in a VM, but you CAN bridge, it's the SAME thing.

Go into network configurations, select click EACH NIC to be a part of the bridge, then right click "bridge adapters".

That's it.

The MAC address will become the bridge and ALL the NICs that are a member of that bridge will no longer have distinct MAC address, and be warned, if ANY of those NICS lose connectivity the entire bridge will go down as well.