After reading a lot of the topics about slow networking or no networking at all
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=91454
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=78606
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=634084
I decided to check out my own small environment. Since my Host's W2K3 Enterprise with sp2, network card had the offload capabilities enabled (Intel Pro 1000 GT) I wondered what would happen if I disabled this.
A mistake I made was to first changing the keys, EnableTCPA=0,EnableTCPChimney=0 and EnableRSS=0 key in 1 of my VM's (a W2k3 sp2 Exchange server which I thought was a tad slow). I did not make a complete backup of the VM because it's easy to undo the 3 regkey changes right?...wrong...!)
(as discussed in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 , http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=78606&start=30&tstart=0 and here http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=634084 ! )
I put in the keys and rebooted the VM, which was the start of a nightmare.
After putting in those keys, I saw huge latency in pingtimes to the internet on my whole network! (request timed out or 1700 ms instead of 12 ms) The network card of the VM was burning non stop (in lower right corner of the console). As soon as I disabled the nic, everything would turn to normal instantly. Enable the card and in a period of 1 to 5 minutes the nightmare would return.
I then realized that I had forgotten to disable the offload stuff in the host's nics so I did,also put in the same regkeys as above, rebooted the host and.....the nightmare continued,the VM was still ripping my network apart.
Well enough testing I thought, let's change everything back to the way it was...enabled all the offload stuff in my host, changed back the keys in the VM and rebooted the whole lot. I was staggered to see that after changing everything back to original state the issue did not go away...I hit myself about 5 times across the head, what now..did I muck up my VM..? I had other w2k3 sp2 vm's that did not have the issue so it must be something I did.
I then tried the following things:
\- re-enabled the keys as described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 rebooted
Still the same issue
\- Disabled offload stuff on the host nic
\- Made a copy of my VM just to be certain
\- Installed the hotfix in my VM from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594
\- Rebooted
Still the same issue
\- Removed the http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 fix
\- Updated the NIC drivers on the host, rebooted
Still the same issue
\- Installed VMWare 1.0.3 (I was running 1.0.1)
\- Upgraded the VMWare tools on the VM, rebooted
Still the same issue
\- Added a second NIC to the VM
\- Uninstalled the first NIC from the VM
\- Give the ipaddress to the first NIC
\- turned off the VM, removed the NIC from the VM
\- Vm did not have an ipadress because the other NIC was still in the system so this is the way to remove it:
\- type in a cmd prompt:
set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 /b
\- then:
devmgmt.msc /b
Tick 'show hidden devices'[/b]
the old nic appeared so I deleted it and set the ipaddress again on the new nic, rebooted
*Still the same issue
\- Reinstalled SP2 on the VM
*Still the same issue
\- Removed SP2 on the VM
*Still the same issue
\- Reset the TCP/IP stack on the VM: netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
*Still the same issue
Created a new VMX file
*Still the same issue
That was the time I started to softly cry as it was 03:15AM..I was tired, I enable all the offload stuff on my NIC's host, turned the regkeys to the way they were, copied my backup of the VM back over the orginal, restarted and still the same issue..I went to bed..
The next morning I checked my machine and my VM's NIC had stopped burning and everything was back to normal....was the whole thing just a virtual bad dream after all..?
I guess I'll never know, here's what I learned though:
\- Make a backup before you change even the simplest thing
\- Make a backup before you change even the simplest thing
\- Make a backup before you change even the simplest thing
\- My VM was not as slow as I thought, because after changing things I really saw what slow means
\- Because an issue occurs a lot with simlair stuff you have, doesn't mean you are having the same issue.
\- Oh yeah, make a backup before you change even the simplest thing
My used hardware:
Intel Pro 1000 GT network adapter
MSI P965 mainboard with onboard Realtek GB NIC.
4 GB RAM
Host OS W2K3 Enterprise with SP2
Hope to have contributed a little to the networking issues you might encounter...