Tips: Hyper-V ping issues Windows 2003 server guests

Aside to the normal blog articles I'm adding some tips of things I have encountered myself and helped me a great deal. The first tip is about the Hyper-V role in Windows 2008.

During my play time with Hyper-V I noticed some very strange ping times when pinging to the guests own name . The guest OS was Windows 2003 server R2 with all Hyper-V drivers. After some online research I found that the problem had to do with having multiple CPU's enabled on the guest. When pinging the guest the internal timer got confused and this resulted in the weird values (negative ping times). When ping is not reliable other features like group policy also suffer and generate errors (Event ID: 1054) in the event log.

To resolve this issue you can do the following:

1. Use Windows 2008 server as guest OS(recommended if possible)
2. Use only one CPU when Windows 2003 as guest OS is used
3. Adjust the boot.ini of the Windows 2003 guest and add /usepmtimer to the last line so it looks like:multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /noexecute=optout /fastdetect /usepmtimer

Another Hyper-V tip is to watch for bios updates of your server. During the Hyper-V beta I had a new update for Dell Poweredgde 2950 bios every beta update. And sometimes for the Broadcom NIC's as well.

Hopefully this works for you like it did for me.