Hello, I have a problem when cloning or restoring W2K8R2 in virtualized environments. Although the "image" is restored or cloned to identical hardware, the original NIC vanishes as ghosted device and a new NIC appears. This means that all network settings and firewall location assignments are lost. The problem, AFAIK, is related how windows handles the detection of PCIe devices (serial number instead of bus/slot/device number) KB 2344941 didn't help in our environment (it was reported it worked in some other environment) but it definitely doesn't work any more with SP1 where KB 2344941 should be integrated anyhow. According to the hotfix of kb 2344941 the device detection should work similar again to PCI devices, but obviously, it doesn't. Any idea how to solve the problem? This is a pretty bad problem for us. Cheers __Leo

what virtualization platform did you used? Hyper-V or virtual server? if you are using Hyper-v, you can check the following post. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/67c4c555-14fd-4164-bf5b-59ce883c8b18/ http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/general-virtualization-articles/cloning-hyper-v-virtual-machines-right-way-part1.html http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/general-virtualization-articles/cloning-hyper-v-virtual-machines-right-way-part2.html

Hello, thanx for your answer, but this doesn't reflect my problem at all. I'm using VMware ESX but that's not really important for this issue. We need *exact* copies of the machines, nothing sysprep'd! This problem should occur on any platform, from bare metal through every hypervisor as soon as you "replace" a PCIe NIC with another NIC, same type and location but different MAC/Serial number. __Leo

Hello, thanx for your answer, but this doesn't reflect my problem at all. I'm using VMware ESX but that's not really important for this issue. We need *exact* copies of the machines, nothing sysprep'd! This problem should occur on any platform, from bare metal through every hypervisor as soon as you "replace" a PCIe NIC with another NIC, same type and location but different MAC/Serial number. __Leo Agree with Leo. We experiencing the same issue in our production VMware infrastructure and wouldn't like to move to Hyper-V due to obvious complexity of this process. Does anybody know any ETA for any hotfix to get the issue in question resolved? Maybe it already exists? :)

We have a similar problem. We reported this issue to MS. They have acknowledged the problem and is working on it. I'll post update as soon as it is available.

Per MS: "Our product team just confirmed that there was an integrate issue when the change for the hotfix #2344941 was integrated into SP1, but the fixed SP1 hasn’t been ready yet. .. The current workaround is copy Pci.sys from Windows 7 w/o SP1+ hotfix #2490742." To work around before the official fix comes out: on a w7 installation w/ hotfix 2490742 (no SP1), make a copy of pci.sys. Use it for other SP1 system. mandy lam

Is that possible that we may run into some security or version incompatibility issues appliying the workaround mentioned above? I'd like to apply this workaround for my Windows Server 2008 R2 environment. So I'd like to be sure I'll not broke anything and the solution provided worth a try. :)--VM