ESXi Based Windows 7 Extenders TV Issue

Well amazingly I think I have fixed it!! As with any good evening hacking I'm not 100% sure what I did - I will rebuild a new one just to check (the good thing about using VM's!!). Anyway - I think there were a number of problems
1) DRM - this seemed to go away after I followed a link to removing/replying the DRM keys to windows 7 - I basically deleted the DRM folder in Windows 7 and went to a MS website where it recreated them (see how do you manually reset the drm media rights? - Microsoft Answers)
2) Network performance - the NIC on my dell server (Dell R210 ii) couldn't keep up. Basically it is poorly designed and shares the same IRQ as a couple of other devices - so the performance is very poor. I fixed this by switching to the second on board NIC.
3) I had to untick all the service options for the ethernet card on windows 7 (link layer/IPv6 etc) just left IPv4 and QOS working.
4) Applied a new Client VM tools patch and updated the tools into the Media Center VM - not sure if it helped but I did it anyway

I did do a bunch of other things so its difficult to be sure - but what I would say is that its now working both with my Linksys 2100 and Xbox 360. I will spend a few more days testing it before building a new VM to prove it.

thanks for all your help.. I will let you know how it goes

Update on the update
1) cram501 is correct "link-layer topology" kills media centre and I am also now using VMXNET3
2) I have now had to switched to using Windows 8 CTP (i.e. pre launch version) – see below for the reason. But this amazingly works fine I am now running Windows 8 CTP with 4 TBS QBOX 2 S2 HD USB sat feeds via an xbox extender and it works fine. Its responsive, with no lip sync, rewind problems.
3) I have built a number of windows 7/8 VM’s now and have had no repeat of the DRM issues.


My situation was much worse due to me using a Dell 210 ii rack server -
(http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/poweredge-r210-ii-technical-guide.pdf) , hopefully the following might help others. I bought the server as it appeared to fit my needs (small rack server, good range of options etc). BUT be warned

a) The cheap RAID card that seems the obviouse choice when configuring the box on the Dell website is the PERC H200, this (I discovered after the fact) has a known configuration issue, which when used for RAID kills the performance. So I now run without any RAID.
b) The first NIC on the Dell 210 is crippled by sharing the same IRQ as the USB and other peripherals. So I am using the second only for media centre the first is restricted to admin functions.
c) I was using USB 2 virtual drivers to pass the 4 USB satellite cards through to my Windows 7 VM. However USB 2 seems to be crippled as I started to suffer huge amounts of signal breakup. The performance of USB 2 was so bad for me that it was simple unusable.

An option that exists in ESXi is to pass the hardware directly to a VM. However I couldn’t pass the Dell USB hardware directly to the VM as there is no Windows 7 workstation driver for this USB 3 chipset (vSphere warns you about this when you try to configure the Windows 7 VM with a xHCI USB port)

Dell do Windows server 2008 drivers but it appears not a Windows 7 workstation version. My solution (in fact the only solution I could find that would allow me to use ESXI 5.0) was to switch to Windows 8 (which as I write I only have the customer technology preview version – this happily has Media Centre built in). ESXi 5.0 does support the USB 3 drivers for Windows 8 CTP. In fact I have not had to pass the hardware directly the to the VM as it appears that the combination of Windows 8 CTP and update 1 to ESXi is good enough to deliver the performance I need for the 4 USB Sat cards – (these by the way are USB 2 devices, and I am running them through a good quality 10 way powered USB 2 hub and into a single USB port on the server).

d) I still had to turn off the "link-layer topology" setting in Windows 8.

e) Windows 8 doesn’t appear to work with my old Linksys 2100 media centre extender boxes but it works fine with my xBox 360 slim.

f) I think there is a fault with the TBS QBOX S2 drivers – it appears that both Windows 7 and 8 drop them (fail to see them) after 36-48hrs – so I now auto reboot the Windows 8 VM every night via a scheduled task.

Hope this helps