Quick Tip: Does my NIC support VMMQ?
Published Feb 22 2021 07:49 PM 8,208 Views
Microsoft

Hi Folks - Most often, when a virtual machine or container is receiving network traffic, the traffic passes through the virtualization stack in the host. This requires host (parent partition) CPU cycles.

 

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If the amount of traffic being processed exceeds that which a single core can handle, the received network traffic must be spread across multiple CPUs. This “spreading” can occur in the operating system – at the expense of more CPU cycles, or hardware (the NIC) as an offload. In hardware, we call this capability Virtual Machine Multi-Queue. The benefit of VMMQ is actually two-fold:

  • It allows you to reach higher throughput into your virtual systems (VMs/Containers)
  • It reduces the cost (in terms of host resources) of processing that network traffic

VMMQ is a combined feature of the NIC, driver/firmware, and operating system. All of these must support VMMQ and be configured properly for you to leverage this offload.

 

To identify if your adapter supports VMMQ, use the Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty cmdlet to see the advanced registry property *RSSOnHostVPorts or “Virtual Switch RSS” – We won’t go into what the naming means but suffice to say that if you see this capability displayed using the command below, your NIC and driver/firmware combination supports VMMQ.

 

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Now you simply need to follow the instructions in this article for how to configure it.

 

Hope this quick tip was helpful!

 
 
 
 
 
 
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