Installing these drivers has already been covered elsewhere.
On some servers (not all), after installing paravirtualized drivers in a Xen guest domain running Windows (Server), the guest system starts slowing down badly. This isn't obvious right away, but becomes noticeable after a few minutes of operation. In Task Manager, CPU load sits no lower than 30-35% at idle, the network runs slowly, and overall the system responds to "stimuli" very sluggishly and reluctantly.
This has been observed on Xen 4.0.1 running through dom0 under the older Linux Debian 5 (Lenny). Incidentally, this is observed considerably less often on Squeeze.
It all comes down to one option in the network card settings (I've already raised this topic before, but here the combination of symptoms is somewhat different).
So what should you do?
There are 2 options:
1) Go back to HVM. Not the best option.
2) The tastiest option: go to the Xen network adapter settings, to the "Advanced" tab, and there we see the "Large Send Offload" parameter. By default, its value is 61440. We remove this value and set it to "Disabled". After that we close properties - and voila! Operation becomes far more pleasant. Network speed on a 100Mbit card comes out to around 9.5-10MB/s, and disk operations and CPU load return to normal.
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