Virtual Server 2005 R2, Windows Server 2003 and Broadcom NetExtreme II cards
Interesting issues with Microsoft’s Virtual Server.
A new IBM x3650 with two Broadcom NetExtreme II cards, running Windows Server 2003 since a few months, flawlessly.
After installing Virtual Server 2005, everything went mayhem. Some machines were still able to contact the server, some not. It looked like something was horribly broken, and at first i had no idea why something like this could happen.
After searching the web, i’ve found a few references to this and similar problems with newer NICs and Virtual Server.
The Broadcom NetExtreme II seem to have a special problem related to Virtual Server 2005, with IPMI. There is a fix from Broadcom available
Just a short network interruption, no restart necessary.
But there are other problem with modern network cards and Virtual Server 2005 (and possibly VMware’s offerings, but i don’t know that).
There’s a KB entry which talks about disabling checksum/segmentation offloading when using Virtual Server 2005.
Vincent:
The links are both not available. Broadcom ftp asks for credentials and i can’t go in to download the utility. Please make the link available again. Thanks
17. June, 2009, 04:22