WinPE drivers for XenServer 7.2

[Greg Wood]

I'm starting to experiment with XenServer, and realized quickly that the inbox Realtek chip that is emulated in WinPE is only 100mbit - that's a dealbreaker.  I found instructions on how to add the paravirtualized NIC driver here:

 

https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2015/03/03/how-to-create-a-winpe-boot-disc-with-xenserver-paravirtualized-network-driver-installed/

 

However, these are for 6.5, and do not work in XenServer 7.2, even if I use the old driver.  I'm very comfortable in WinPE, and do a lot of customizations already.  I even went as far back as creating an image with the last version this supports (ADK 8.0) with nothing else - still no dice - while the driver actually loads into memory, the networking stack is only using the Realtek driver.  I know this is all "unsupported", but I'm curious if anyone has figured out a workaround.  Ideas I would entertain:

 

• Figuring out the missing link to getting this to work in XenServer 7.2
• Somehow force a VM to use paravirtualized no matter what, even if it means no network connectivity (is this possible?  Can you "turn off" the NIC emulation?)

 

For now, I'm forcing it to use e1000 via the qemu-dm-wrapper hack, which I guess is good enough

[ROBERT ORAM]

Did you ever figure out how to do this?  If not, what is the "qemu-dm-wrapper hack"??  Where can I find more on that?

 

Thanks!

[Wyger van der Meer]

I think he means

 

https://blogs.serioustek.net/post/2016/07/28/adding-e1000-nic-xenserver-7

 

 

[Alan Lantz]

I never was able to get WinPE to work with 1GB, just 100Mb so my restore times were so slow it made it 

unreasonable. I gave up on it.

 

--Alan--