Forum Discussion
vNVMe on Hyper-V to unlock PCIe 5.0 NVMe performance
Hi all, I agree that using VMware NVMe Controller in a VM delivers better performance compared to VMware default SCSI Emulation and I suspect the same would happen to Windows Hyper-V
I can even tell this NVMe controller delivers better perf. when using SAN that is not using a single NVMe or SSD but traditional HDD. This might be due to the protocol stack.
There are improvements in NVMe storage driver that might not be seen in the SCSI emulation but only the WS Storage and Hyper-V Team could help here.
What would be cool but hard to test is a direct comparison of same HW with VMware and Hyper-V Windows Server 2025. Please keep in mind to use the latest Diskmark as this has an updated and optimized diskspd.exe.
Thanks for the insight. I’m using the latest official DiskSpd from Microsoft (v2.2 at the time of testing), with OS cache disabled and latency reporting enabled to keep results clean and comparable.
Unfortunately I can’t run a side‑by‑side VMware test on the same hardware right now, but I fully agree it would be very valuable to have an apples‑to‑apples comparison (vNVMe on ESXi vs. the current synthetic SCSI path on Hyper‑V) using identical DiskSpd workloads.
It would be great if someone from the WS Storage & Hyper‑V Team could chime in here—both to confirm current guidance and to share whether a paravirtual NVMe device or further storage‑stack optimizations are on the roadmap for future Windows Server/Hyper‑V releases.