I use the HP Microserver Gen 8’s at home, since they are quiet and act as a full-grown server with full iLO support, dual network adapters and then some. I can basically do all kinds of testing with new operating systems and system center management platforms without upsetting my family to much and that is very practical.

During the deployment of Windows Server Technical Preview everything worked as expected. After the installation I added the Hyper-V role to start testing to deploy VM’s. I booted up the MDT Boot image, selected the Task Sequence and the install was working great, but hey, the network performance???

According to ImageX it will take 45 minutes to lay down the image! That cannot be correct, there is something wrong here. That kind of slow performance over the network just have to be an issue.. and it is…

You need to update the network driver for the built-in network adapters in HP Proliant Microserver Gen 8.

The built in driver is a Broadcom Nextreme driver and that does not work correctly with Hyper-V

Download the HP Ethernet 1 GB 2-port 332i Adapter driver from HP and install that instead, the 45 minutes is now just 5 minutes…

Happy Deployment.
/mike