salaud speaks

I have VMWare Server 2.0 running on an Ubuntu Intrepid host with a Windows 2003 Server guest OS. The network speed, evidenced by SAMBA/SMB connections, was a crawl compared with other XP guests. I scratched my head for a long time. THE SOLUTION: Change the guest VM “Number of Processors” setting from 2 to 1. Network speed goes back to expected speed.

I used Intel PRO 100/1000 NICs, so I thought I might have a bug that was described which required turning off certain features on the card with ethtool. I tried proprietary drivers… I tried putting a different model NIC in… nothing seemed to work.

So, I installed Jaunty and latest VMWare Server 2.0.1 on another box to see if it was a host OS problem that Jaunty would fix over Intrepid. This old box happened to have one processor, so I set the VMs for that, and realized, by the MOST COUNTER-INTUITIVE WINDOWS CRAP on the planet, that this may have been the difference.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under M$, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.