Server 2008 guest and VLAN tagging

[Lagersuufer]

After spending a day beating my head against VBox and VLAN tagging, I finally got it all working. I was unable to find any single post with all the answers (and way to many "you must be doing it wrong") to all the nagging problems that arose at each step, so I thought I would consolidate the information here and hopefully help some other soul.

Hardware:
Dell Optiplex 7010 w/ 8GB RAM (shouldn't matter)
Network Card: Intel 82579LM Gigabit (Also shouldn't matter, but it actually does)

Software:
VirtualBox Ver. 4.3.20 r96997
Host: Windows 2008 R2
Guest: Windows 2008 R2

Assumption:
You have a correctly configured network switch with trunking setup to allow the VLAN you are attempting to enable on the Guest system.

Configuration:
Once you have a bootable, functioning Windows 2008R2 guest installed, you can proceed to configure the VLAN tagging. Make sure your VM can access the network using the Intel Pro/1000 MT Server adapter, set to Bridged Adapter. The other Intel adapters will also work, but this is the one that I used.
You will find that there is no place to configure VLAN tagging natively in Windows. Intel provides a driver enhancement (not part of the base driver install) called ProSet and Advanced Settings. You get this software addition when you install the full driver downloaded from the Intel site.

Intel has a great page full of useful driver packages. As it turns out some are more useful than others. Go to the downloadcenter.intel.co.. on Intel's website and search for "ethernet CD"
The latest driver CD from Intel (19.5) will give you the error message "No Intel adapter found" and will refuse to install. You need to search for an older driver CD. I used version 18.0.

Next, you have to manually install/update the driver for the Intel network card (update the driver, browse your local system, and pick the driver from the list of drivers), otherwise, Windows will tell you it has a better driver already in place. Once the driver has been updated, you can run the AutoRun on the CD to install the full driver package that includes the ProSet features.

Now, that Proset is installed, you can open the properties of the network card and see several new tabs, one of which is VLAN Tagging. It is easy, you tell it the VLAN you want to use and it creates a virtual network device. Based on other posts, at this point if your network switch is configured correctly to handle the VLAN, you should be done. Which is where all the "you must not be doing it right" comments come from.

If your Host system uses an Intel card (and based on some reading, applies to some Broadcom cards as well), you aren't done yet. Wiresharking the traffic you will see packets leaving the Guest system, and responses coming back, but never acknowledged by the Guest. That is because the packets never reach the guest, they get corrupted by the Host. You can verify that the Guest is configured correctly by observing that the Guest MAC is showing up on your switch in the correct VLAN. What is happening, is the Host's Intel network card by default will strip the VLAN tags on incoming packets. The issue is described here: intel.co... /support/network/sb/CS-005897.htm (I'd Post a link but can't yet)

To fix the problem, you have to modify the registry to tell the Intel card not to strip VLAN tags. The registry setting is driver dependent.

Location of the registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\00nn

Where nn is the physical instance of the network port where you want to capture the VLAN tags.

If you have a driver starting with e1g, e1e, or e1y, the new DWORD key is MonitorModeEnabled - set the value to 1
If you have a driver starting with e1c, e1d, e1k, e1q, e1r, ixe, ixn, or ixt, the DWORD key is MonitorMode - set the value to 1

Reboot the Host for the key to take effect.

Voila! Your Guest windows system can now tag it own VLAN traffic.

[GreatDivideIT]

Thanks for taking the time to put these notes together. Huge time saver for the next person (if they stumble across your kb). I am planning 3 VM's on two separate VLANs to be run on Hyper V. I've used VBox enough to feel like it would be easier to do this on a Type1 hyper visor. I was curious why you didn't add the Hyper V role to the 2008 R2 host and then set up your virtual network switches in Hyper V? But regardless, your steps will help someone save a lot of time. Nice work.