Windows Server 2008 R2 With Hyper-V Spontaneous Reboots _After_ Nehalem Update – Binding Order

One of the benefits of spending time with my fellow MVPs at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit was the ability to talk to so many different product group MVPs.

In one conversation, there was talk about the “why” a server would spontaneously combust _after_ the Hyper-V Nehalem patch was applied.

• MS Knowledgebase 975530: Stop error message on an Intel Xeon 5500 series processor-based computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 and that has the Hyper-V role installed: "0x00000101 - CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT"

A clustering MVP, whose name unfortunately cannot be recalled at the moment, made it clear that the binding order on the Hyper-V box, whether in a cluster or not, must be ordered correctly.

Now, for those of us familiar with SBS 2003 Premium RTM/R2 with ISA, one of the critical post OS and ISA steps was to check the NIC binding order to make sure that the LAN NIC came before the ISA NIC.

On one of our servers that we put together has been randomly rebooting so we checked the bindings and this is what we found:

Note that the NIC that has the Hyper-V Virtual Switch bound to it is _before_ the LAN NIC!

So, we rearrange the order so that the NICs look like the following:

Once we have done the above, we rebooted the server. We should now see a stable server setup.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

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