After some problems with the NIC driver, my Windows Server 2008 is running fine.

With all the BSOD’s i had in the beginning, the index was below 5.00 at some point. But since i replaced the NIC driver, the Sysytem Stability Chart is rising steadily.

No problems whatsoever, everything is working very stable. The only disadvantage of working with 5 virtual machines on Hyper-V is that when you have to install updates on the host that require a reboot, all VMs have to be restarted. Besides that, i can only see benefits of working this way.

I run my Domotica-VM on Windows 2003. I call it the Domotica-VM, but it does much more than that; SQL Server 2005 and IIS are also running in that same VM. I still had an issue to resolve there, which was adding a startup-delay to my Domotica application.
Whenever the VM booted, my Domotica app just started to fast, immediately trying to connect to the SQL Server, which was just to busy at that moment to accept connections, resulting in a messagebox saying it couldn’t find the SQL Server. So i had to build in some sort of delay for starting up my Domotica app. First let SQL Server go through it’s process of starting up, and then my Domotica application.
The standard Windows 2003 Task Scheduler doesn’t have a delay feature, so i searched for some handy little piece of software that could take care of automatically starting up my Domotica application with a delay of let’s say half a minute.

I found an appllication called Xecutor that could do just that. It’s small, and it removes itself from memory when it has completed its tasks; just what i needed. Very neat. I’ll send them a postcard

Some moments ago i updated the NIC driver. Current driver version is 6.203.214.2008, made for Vista, but i was able to install it on my Windows 2008 Server. At reboot Hyper-V service got stuck, it didn’t want to shutdown, so i had to push the reset-button. However, everything booted ok afterwards. At the same time i re-installed the 4GB RAM i recently removed. So now i’m back to 8GB, with a more recent driver. Now all i can do is wait to see if this driver-update has helped…

Since i virtualized a bunch of my PC’s, i’m having some trouble lately with my Windows 2008 Server running Hyper-V RC1. I get BSOD’s way to much, somewhere around 1 every 2 days. I was lucky that i witnessed the BSOD on 2 occasions and i could see vmswitch.sys being mentioned on the screen as the possible culprit. This lead me to the following Microsoft TechNet Forum post. 

Well, that can’t be a coincidence that this thread mentions the same NIC as i have on my Gigabyte EP35-DS4 motherboard. It seems to be a problem in the driver for this NIC (an on-board Realtek RTL8168/8111 Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC). So probably updating the driver should help, although i don’t know yet how to handle this if the driver is not digitally signed..we’ll see. The replacement RAM was already purchased, cause the problems started around the same time that i added an additional 4GB so i blamed that at first… well, nevermind, a bit of spare RAM is always handy