IT Camps - Hyper-V Network Optimization
Recently we have series of IT Camps on Virtualization and Private Cloud in Singapore. Check out Spiffy.sg article to find out more about the IT Camps. One of the topics that generates quite a lot interests is the Hyper-V Network Optimization. We covered quite few network optimization technologies during the Camps. Here is a quick summary on these networking optimizations TCP Chimney offload VM Chimney VMQ Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) TCP Chimney TCP Chimney Offload is a networking technology that allows the work associated with moving data across a network to be offloaded from the host computer’s CPU to the physical network adapter. In Windows Server 2008, TCP Chimney Offload enables the Windows networking subsystem to offload the processing of a TCP/IP connection to a network adapter that includes special support for TCP/IP offload processing. The offload capabilities must be enabled in the driver for the physical network adapter in the root partition. VM Chimney VM-Chimney (TCP Offload) allows the CPU workload associated with TCP/IP traffic to be offloaded to the physical NIC, reducing processor usage and increasing network performance. This has been available for physical host, now it is available for the guest operating systems. VMQ VMQ is a technology that allows the physical NIC to create unique virtual network queues for each virtual machine (VM) on the host, allowing network packets to be passed directly from the hypervisor to the VM. This reduces a lot of overhead normally associated with network traffic. Note: If a NIC has support for both VMQ and VM-Chimney, VMQ will be used. Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) Receive-Side Scaling (RSS) resolves the single-processor bottleneck by allowing the receive side network load from a network adapter to be shared across multiple processors. RSS enables packet receive-processing to scale with the number of available processors. This allows the Windows Networking subsystem to take advantage of multi-core and many core processor architectures. Jumbo Frames Jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload. Conventionally, jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload, but variations exist. Many Gigabit Ethernet switches and Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards support jumbo frames. Hyper-V Networking Best Practices Use multiple network adapters on physical hosts To ensure good networking performance, you should use separate physical adapters for the following different networks. ...