There’s an installer available for windows virtio network drivers that can be downloaded from the kvm wiki site which makes installation of your windows paravirtual network drivers a bit simpler. According to the instructions, it will handle 95% of cases, except for certain cases where there are multiple virtio devices, some of which are using older virtio drivers. Unfortunately it is not a simple one click followed by clicking next repeatedly as the binary drivers are not bundled with the installer but it is still simple to execute.

Along with the installer are some important release notes which are listed below:

During installation on "server" platforms (XP64, 2003, 2008) there are system pop-ups related to installation of unsigned drivers. These pop-ups can not be suppressed and the installation must be confirmed manually.

1. During installation there are pop-ups of drivers search etc - they usually are closed automatically and should be ignored.
2. Sometimes pop-up (1) may be not visible under pop-up (2) - the installation will wait until the pop-up (1) confirmed.
3. Expected placement of installer is in the root of driver's tree. If the placement is different, command-line should include the actual driver's root path, relative or absolute.
4. In order to collect the log of installation - run Debugview and enable Win32 logging capture.

In the next section, I've outlined the procedure for using the installer.

1. Download the Installer and binary drivers onto running Windows Guest

First step is to download both the installer and the binary drivers to your running windows guest machine. The installer can be found here and the latest binary drivers can be found as an iso here.

There official wiki page with download links can be found here: http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/VirtioWindowsDrivers

2. Unpack installer into Root of Driver Directory

In order for the installer to work, it must be placed in the root directory of the binary drivers directory. If you don’t place the installer in the root of the driver tree, you’ll have to run the installer from the command line and specify the location of the binary drivers. To do this, mount the iso of the binary drivers you downloaded as a cdrom in your windows guest machine and copy the contents into a specified directory. For example, on my guest I created a directory called c:\netkvm and copied the contents of the iso cdrom there. Next copy your netkvminstall.exe installer into your directory containing the binary drivers. In my case, I copied it to c:\netkvm. Your directory should look like below if you followed my example.

3. Reboot Guest Machine to use Virtio Network Drivers

You must now shutdown and startup your windows guest machine to use virtio network drivers by starting with the following parameters in order to use the virtio network drivers.

qemu-system-x86_64 –hda windows.img –m 400 –net user –net nic,model=virtio

When your machine boots up it will detect the new virtio network drivers.

4. Run installer

On detection of the new virtio network driver by your windows guest machine, a pop up will appear that you can ignore by clicking cancel.

At this stage, you can either double click the netkvminstall.exe or run it from the command line. Once you execute the installer you will see the following window tracing the installation.

At some point during the installation process you will get a prompt notifying you that the driver is an unsigned driver asking you if you would like to continue anyway.

Confirm that you want to continue anyway and the installation will complete and you can start using your virtio drivers immediately.

So next time you need to install windows paravirtual network driver, you can give this installer a try.