SCVMM 2012 - Failed to add "Microsoft Sythetic Ethernet Port"

So the title of this blog is slightly ironic as it should be more "Once Yearly IT" as I haven't had as much time as I'd like to commit to posting here. I will post about my latest project/problem in hopes that I can spare someone else a few hours of misery.

Lately we have been building our own development VM host machines using 2U rackmount cases, Tyan motherboards, 2x 1.9 Ghz 12 core Opterons, and 64GB of PC3-10600 1333. Lets just say, for what we would pay for a 2U box from a vendor with less specs, we could build 3 of these. As we are amassing quite a lot of VMs now with our new hardware, my boss has tasked me with implementing a way to create a private cloud with a web interface so that end users can create, manage and deploy their own VMs without bothering us constantly about it.

This is where Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 comes in. I had tinkered with the beta for a short time, but recently the RC became available for download. There are already several good blogs out there outlining how to properly install SCVMM 2012 so I won't spend any time discussing that, rather this blog post will be about an error that had me racking my brain for days and scouring technet posts for hours at a time. Installation went smoothly, I created the host group without a hitch, added all of our development machines to the host group, it was all going smooth... too smooth.

My first hitch came when I attempted to create my first VM directly on a host using a blank vhd and mounting a network-shared ISO. SAVE YOURSELF A LOT OF TIME: Don't bother trying to mount an ISO from one of your library shares, it will not work. Hopefully that is fixed in the the RTM. I kept getting the same error over and over, the creation job would run to 50% and fail with an error of" Failed to add Microsoft sythentic ethernet port". I could go to the very same host machine and create a VM manually and the network adapter would create fine, this had me pulling my hair out.

Simple solution: We are running Trend OfficeScan client on all of our machines, in fact it is in the PXE images I have created. After scouring the internet for days, I kept noticing a common trend (pun intended), and that was that trend was causing issues with adding hardware during VM creation. After uninstalling officescan client, the vm created fine, network adapter and all.

I am now in the process of refining our VM templates for use in the Self-Service Portal/Private Cloud, check back as I will certainly be making blog posts as the progress continues.