Making Hyper-V working on HP Proliant ml350 on Server 2008 x64

Making this work have taken a couple of days, because different BSODs have appered randomly. I have been talking with HP support, and browsed almost the complete Internet for a solution. Now what I found out…

First, I installed Server 2008 from the DVD without the smartstart CD. This might be wrong, as some of the problems (as far as I know) could be avoided using the CD.

When the server was first installed (2 months ago), Hyper-V where in beta, it was later updated to a RC, and the final version can now be downloaded from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F3AB3D4B-63C8-4424-A738-BADED34D24ED&displaylang=en.
When upgrading to RC/final, hell began…

To make everything work, make shure that you remove the old Hyper-V role before this final version is installed (did not do that: many things went wrong). When removing the role, the server might not shut down, wait, wait more, then give up and shut it down the hard way.

Start up, the removal might go wrong by saying installing updates stage 3 ??%, if you cannot boot, try again. If still no luck, start in fail safe mode, then reboot.

Install the updated version and reboot, this might go wrong as well (for me it stopped at stage 3, 71%), reboot, try again…

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Now, if you get some strange errors like that the server gets a STOP 0x000000F4, try to install the newest Broadcom Netxtreme II for BCM5708C from IBM:
http://www-304.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5070012&brandind=5000020.
It will install the newest driver available.

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Some other strange things happend like I where unable to copy big files (10gb approx) from one place to another on the same disk; it resulted in the same type of blue screen. This issue was resolved by installing the Proliant Support Pack:
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/psp/index.html.

UPDATE: If you get some strange encryption errors when remotely connecting to your guest OS, then disable “IPv4 Large Send Offload” for the broadcom nic in the advanced tab in device manager; more info:
http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/9a6a45a9-76c2-4067-8fd0-73b5254681d5/.

If the virtual machines looses network connection and have problems stopping, try to set “IPv4 Checksum Offload” to None.

Now, Hyper-V runs smoothly:)
Leave a comment if you have questions, it took me long to find this out:)