Saturday, August 31, 2013

Proxmox 3.1 with Windows Guests

So far I am loving Proxmox 3.1, for the ease of use and the great app to manage it on android.

Linux guest installs work like a charm, although instead of being able to import a standard VM file, Like OVA, OVF, VMDK, it seems to work better if you install fresh and use the qcow2 format for the storage, because it enables the use of live snapshots.

So after researching and trying to figure out WHY windows networking in proxmox doesn't work out of the box, I found the solution.

So I will now share what I did and make the files available sometime this weekend.

I am going to list each Windows OS and what networking method worked with each, in my set up.

Windows Xp  =  Intel E1000
Windows 2003 Server  =  Intel E1000
Windows 7  =  Intel E1000
Windows 8  =  Intel E1000 new drivers
Windows 8.1 (aka Blue)  =  VirtIO (paravirtualized)

I have yet to get vista on my lab.

Here are the links to the drivers. The only way to import these into your Windows Guests, is to mount it in the cd drive, which in the first link below, meant I had to make the Zip and ISO, which I did using IMGBurn on windows.

It took a better part of a day re-installing all my OS's onto this New Lab Server, but now that I have done all the hard work, take my notes and your install should be a little less stressful.