How to improve the network speed of Hyper-V host and guest!

[bodhi]

I just recently found out how to improve the speed of my host and guest VM running on hyper-v by as much as 50%!

 

After much digging around I came to a realization that some NIC are not up to the standard that microsoft standard has set out when they created hyper-v.

As in the case of my server runnning the realtek NIC hardware.

 

I found that as soon as I disable the TCP offloading engine on the virtual switch adapter, my system speed was greatly increased.

 

Before it was a sluggish nightmare just trying to work on the host server.

After disabling the TOE, it is running very fast and I am very happy about it.

 

The purpose behind TOE is that it allows the tcpip stack I/O to be handle by the NIC adapter and not the CPU.

Sounds great if your running a Intel NIC worth $200.

But on these cheap NICs that most of use are running on lab test servers, they do not have the capacity to handle the high I/O that a hyper visor requires.

 

Hopefully this guide will help many of you from this problem.

 

(To disable TOE on the virtual switch, just go into the virtual switch properties/configure/advance tab. disable everything that says "offload")

(Restart the Host server.)

[adamv6]

If you have VMs with high network usage, you can implement the HSN regkeys on the HyperV host.

 

You need to make sure the NICs on your HyperV host support VMQs (Virtual Machine Queues), but if they do, you will be able to get the same performance on your VM NIC as you do on your host NIC.