Today, I was setting up a couple of Dell PowerEdge 1900 servers to use Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1.  All was going well, until I cranked up a guest machine using Virtual Server.  I’m running on Windows Server 2003, and had just used the default drivers out of the box, so I figured it would “just work”. 

I should have known better!  When starting up a guest OS using Virtual Server, the host network stopped functioning altogether!  I have two of these servers to set up, so I thought I’d try and replicate it on the other box – funny, it did the same thing.  Whenever a guest started that was configured to use the Host NIC, the host network would stop functioning.

After some research, I found that others were having this issue as well, and the issue seemed to point to the NIC itself.  After doing a little research, I found a write up by Ray Comvalius that pointed me in the right direction.

I’ve copied and pasted his procedure below:

This is the procedure that worked for me:

Step 1) Ensure the latest drivers from Broadcom are installed on the

host machine (not the DELL ones). These are available from

http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/netxtremeii.php


Step 2) Grab update package from Broadcom that will disable IPMI as
appropriate to your O/S

a) Windows 2003 X64 – ftp://Net_sys_anon@ftp1.broadcom.com/web/utility_x64.zip

b) Windows 2003 – ftp://Net_sys_anon@ftp1.broadcom.com/web/utility_x86.zip

Step 3) Determine the MAC address for the NICs you want to "fix". You
can get this from Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools ->
System Information : Components : Network : Adapter. There are lots of adapters listed here so be careful to choose the right ones.

Step 4) Extract and execute "run.bat" and enter the MAC address collected in step 3