I finally felt I had time to get round to installing the Windows 7 Beta and see what all the fuss was about for myself. Now I could setup my shiney new Samsung NC10 to dual boot it but I thought it would be best to play it safe and start off with a virtual machine. Apart from the helpful snapshot function in ESX it would also be more team friendly as the rest of the technicians could access it. So I created a new VM on one of our ESX dev servers, assigned it a 12GB virtual disk and attached the 32bit ISO of Windows 7 Beta, then started it. All went according to plan to start with, the standard Windows install questions, a reboot or two and eventually I ended up with a Windows 7 desktop in the console.

 The plan worked for about two minutes until I noticed there was no network connection, and checking the Device Manager showed it knew there was an Ethernet Controller but it couldn't find a suitable driver. The driver update utility looked very similar to the Vista one but of course wanted to look on the Internet so was a non-starter. I thought this was pretty peculiar as you can't get much more standard than VMware virtual devices, and Microsoft must expect users to test a beta in a virtual environment. Suspicious that this might be a cunning ploy to encourage the use of Hyper-V I had a quick Google, expecting a rapid answer.

Strangely enough it seems that this isn't a common problem at all, or at least not one people have bothered to mention in all their helpful "how to install Windows 7 Beta" articles. I eventually found the answer buried in a website detailing how to install Windows Server 2008 in VMware Fusion on a Mac (not sure why anyone would want to do that?). All I had to do was shutdown the VM, then download its .vmx file from the datastore so I could edit it and add ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" to the end of it. This tells ESX to emulate an Intel Pro1000 NIC, next time I booted the VM it straightaway came up "installing new device driver" and then proudly announced it had installed an Intel NIC for me. Next the "choose your network location" windows came up, I selected "Work" and it happily found itself an IP address via DHCP and connected.

I suspect the problem was self-inflicted, when I first created my new VM on the ESX server I chose the "other" OS option, rather than the perhaps more obvious "Windows Server 2008 (32-bit)" option. For some reason that must cause it to emulate some esoteric NIC type not recognised by Windows 7. One of the first things I did after discovering the problem was to change that setting but it seems it doesn't then update the .vmx file - hence the need to add it manually.