Note: Please see this blog post for the most updated recommendations on this subject.
EDIT: On 3/12/2008, we have posted a new blog post that talks about the hotfix that we have released for this...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
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Windows 2003 Scalable Networking pack and its possible effects on Exchange
We were definitely experiencing symptoms of this on our Exchange cluster and we feel it may explain recent client-DC issues. We're speculating that aberrations in the network traffic exposed another issue in Exchange Microsoft is working with us on and may be fixed with an unreleased patch addressing store.exe cache flushing and database page allocation.
I wanted to add that I did quite a bit of testing with disabling the TCPA/Chimney/RSS features at the OS level, which showed improvement, but we didn't get fully proper behaviour until I also disabled all TCP offload and RSS on the driver configuration for our HP DL385G2 servers. It defies normal network troubleshooting because narrowing down traffic issues which seem node specific fail to indicate any issue with the end node nor intervening links. Other traffic traveling to the same endpoint via the same path may pass just fine.
I wanted to add that I did quite a bit of testing with disabling the TCPA/Chimney/RSS features at the OS level, which showed improvement, but we didn't get fully proper behaviour until I also disabled all TCP offload and RSS on the driver configuration for our HP DL385G2 servers. It defies normal network troubleshooting because narrowing down traffic issues which seem node specific fail to indicate any issue with the end node nor intervening links. Other traffic traveling to the same endpoint via the same path may pass just fine.