e1000 not working correctly for win 2003 R2 an d kernel 2.6.32-2-pve

A

alain

Renowned Member
May 17, 2009
224
2
83
France/Paris
Hi all,

I have a bunch of windows 2003 R2 (SP2) servers to migrate from Virtual server 2005 to Proxmox, two of them being domain controller, so I am cautious.

I first tried with an unimportant server (applying mergeide.reg to support IDE disk, uninstalling virtual machine addition, then detect new hardware, BSOD at second reboot, with error processr.sys, disable it with 'sc config processor start= disabled).

The way I did it is to create a new VM, type win 2003, with the same disk size as the machine I want to migrate, then replace the raw files with the vhd files from virtual server. I chose e1000 as Network card, as this is this one that Martin or Tom advise to choose for windows, and it works for other win 2008 servers.

But I had serious network problems (losing connection, unable to find domain PDC, browser errors 8021 and 8032 and so on), and was forced to go back to the virtual 2005 machine.

I then decided to set up a brand new 2003 R2 VM on Proxmox to see if the problem came from virtual server migration or other cause. I also chose e1000 as network card.
Installation went fine, but first thing I noticed after reboot, is that I was unabled to update windows (at least with SP2). I was also unable to download Firefox, to connect to an FTP server using Filezilla and so on. I disabled windows Firewall, but with no avail.

I decided to test with nmap, from inside the windows VM machine, scanning another windows server, and found to my great surprise, that all 1000 ports were filtered (although the firewall was also disabled on the other server).
It was weird, because I accessed previously shares on this server....

In the other way, from the windows server to the VM machine, all 1000 ports appaeared also to be also filtered (although windows firewall was disabled, and printer and file share enabled).

I thought perhaps something get wrong in the installation, remove the machine, and redo all the installation. But the result was the same (I chose fix address instead of DHCP).

To test, I decided to remove the e1000 card, and to install another one. I could have chose Realtek, but on an old win 2003 proxmox VM, I had virtio card, so I decided to test this one. I installed virtio NIC with KVM drivers from Sept 24 2009.

And in this case, all went fine, nmap showed all the open ports in both directions (from one server to the other), and network instabilities disappeared.

So my question : are e1000 drivers working correctly on windows 2003 R2 ? They seem to be OK on windows 2008 (both standard and R2).

Here is my pve version :
~# pveversion -v
pve-manager: 1.5-9 (pve-manager/1.5/4728)
running kernel: 2.6.32-2-pve
proxmox-ve-2.6.32: 1.5-7
pve-kernel-2.6.32-1-pve: 2.6.32-4
pve-kernel-2.6.32-2-pve: 2.6.32-7
pve-kernel-2.6.24-9-pve: 2.6.24-18
pve-kernel-2.6.24-8-pve: 2.6.24-16
qemu-server: 1.1-14
pve-firmware: 1.0-5
libpve-storage-perl: 1.0-13
vncterm: 0.9-2
vzctl: 3.0.23-1pve11
vzdump: 1.2-5
vzprocps: 2.0.11-1dso2
vzquota: 3.0.11-1
pve-qemu-kvm: 0.12.4-1
ksm-control-daemon: 1.0-3

Noticed I installed 32 bit version of windows 2003 R2.

Thanks for informations.

Alain
 
the integrated intel nic driver in win2003 is not working in KVM (but the windows device manager shows that is working!), so did you download the latest intel drivers (from intel.com)?
 
Yes, the device manager shows it working, and no, I did not download the latest drivers from Intel, as I thought it was working out of the box (due to the advice to choose this device preferentially).

I can try to find the latest divers and test...

Alain
 
I downloaded and installed the latest Intel driver, and indeed all is OK now.

The problem with this approach is that you don't have a fully functionnal network interface after the first reboot, where you are asked to update your server. You would think with such a common interface, that windows has the drivers (and indeeed all apear OK in device manager), and that the latest drivers would only improve performance... And you need a working network to upload the driver (you would need an iso image to install the drivers through virtual CD, of course, you are always able to create one...).

As a side note, I obtained a bandwith of about 300 Mbit/s with this driver (measured with iperf), between host and guest, and I managed to get ~850 Mbit/s with virtio Net interface. For windows 2003, I wonder if it is not the one to adopt...

Thanks nevertheless for the hint.

Alain
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom