Ubuntu on Hyper-V issues with Integration Services

I’ve set up a new VM with Ubuntu 10.10 server, running on our Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1 cluster.

I followed the excellent walkthrough by Ben Armstrong here to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.

However after the install completed, I immediatly I ran into problems. Following the instructions to enable the Integration Services, after a reboot there was still no network connectivity, and I started seeing strange errors during the boot process mentioning Call Trace errors.

As well, the CPU on the VM was running at 100% constantly.

After further reboots, the VM would lock up entirely and become unresponsive.

I restarted the process, but immediately after first login made a snapshot and started looking.

Running the “top” command, I found the process ksoftirqd taking 100% of the CPU. Looking into that brought me to this forum post:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1494797

It sounds very similar to my environment, as I’m using Dell R410 with Broadcom NIC’s.
Following those instructions, I was able to disable the integration components and add a legacy network adapter. Now the VM is running just fine.

Of course, I’m going to have to set up NTP now, and accept a bit of lower performance, but in this instance, thats fine.

If I ever do find out the source of this issue, I’ll edit this post.