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.

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

I finished a new page today, containing CPU Charts for all of my virtual machines. This way i can keep track of what’s going on ‘ínside’ my virtual machines, without having to log on to the server all the time. The data for these CPU Charts are produced by a Powershell script running on the host, that periodically does some WMI querys and stores the results in a SQL Server table.

I’m planning on expanding the monitoring of the virtual machines by adding things like disk usage, uptime etc so i have a good view of how the systems are performing and whether they need attention or are just running fine.