TL;DR version: virtual Windows instance reinstalls GPU drivers while switching to other hosts despite the fact it's getting the same hardware all the time. I'm trying to avoid it / shorten its time
Full version: I've got an iSCSI server (Windows Server 2016) and a few diskless targets. Those targets are physically the same machines and contain a few Nvidia GTX 1080Ti graphic cards each. A few targets have 1080Ti from Asus (let's say machines A and B), other ones have 1080Ti from Gigabyte (machines C and D).
I use a single VHDX (with Windows 10) mounted as iSCSI initiator and the machine A is network booting the image. everything is OK, so I shut down Windows and remap the image for booting on machine B. Everything is OK again, so I shut down Windows and remap the image for booting on machine C. Then, "Getting devices ready" and spinning wheel appear for quite a time until desktop finally shows up (it takes up to 1 hour, so you understand it may be irritating).
It turned out that the operating system is reinstalling Nvidia drivers because it detects them as different cards, which isn't completely true (only subvendor differs, everything else is the same). Booting the image on D is normal, but going back again to A or B makes drivers reinstall again. All drivers and versions are up-to-date.
I have done a quick'n'dirty workaround for that which shortens the driver reinstall time by 4 times, but I'm searching for more elegant solution. The quick'n'dirty solution is to kill drvinst.exe after first card shows up, then reboot. All cards are intact then and working, hence my assumption the reinstall is NOT neccesary, or at least not to its full extent on all cards.
I have similar issue when working on Hyper-V virtual machines (Windows 10) with Tesla cards virtualized with DDA (Hyper-V Server 2019), but then the reinstall happens always after I remove the VM and set it up again, even on the same host.
The question is: can I somehow block Windows from trying to discover changes in hardware to prevent drivers reinstall? I tried disabling drvinst.exe facility but that yields exclamation marks near each card after machine change.
