I’ve been trying out a few things, trying to push the envelope of some VM configurations to see what happens. I’d set up a VM in VMM and forgot to mount a installation DVD image. The machine fired up and booted up the PXE client. It found my WDS server and was ready for me to log in when I got back to it.
A quick rummage and I found that the NIC in the default new machine template was the Legacy Adapter rather than the integration components enabled one. So:
- When creating IC enabled VM’s, be aware of this. A IC enabled NIC is more resource efficient than the Legacy Adapter. If you mainly deal with WXP, Vista, W2003 or W2008 then have a machine template that has the Integration Component/Services NIC rather than the Legacy Adapter.
- This is good for heterogeneous environments where your Linux is Xen-enabled but doesn’t have IC components.