Windows Server 08R2Hyper-V

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leeishom

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 19, 2011
Messages
72
Hi Guys,

Does Hyper-V, require a specific brand or type of NIC? Using Intel, generally a proper fit?
 
It's pretty tolerant if you have network connectivity, but some drivers have better performance than others. It's not specific to Hyper-V but noticable with Hyper-V.
 
I haven't used qlogic, but I've had very poor file copy performance with broadcom on XEN, VMWare, and Hyper-V.
 
I've installed realtek and other network cards on my Hyperv servers. You can always install drivers via the command line.

Only card I had a hard time with was a TrendNet gigabit card work, lots of instability.
 
Hey, thanks guys for all the insight.

TrendNet is what's inside right now - not playing nice with each other at all. Vista Drivers did not work either.
I may just bite the bullet and buy Intel, of course not a bad thing.
 
If you can use a Realtek chipset NIC then Newegg has a Rosewill one for $14.99 shipped. Don't get me wrong I prefer Intel, but if this is a lab and you can save a few pennies, why not?
 
Hyper-V is mostly agnostic to the underlying NIC hardware. It uses a wrapper driver around the IHV driver. So it should work, unless your IHV can't write standardized NDIS drivers (in which case you should question whether they should be in this market at all).

For general performance, the main differentiator is the NIC's packet buffer size. Think of it as a cache for NIC's. Desktop NIC's (like the Intel 82579) are (IIRC) 32KB. Server NIC's (like the Intel 82576) are (IIRC) 128KB. It plays a large role when you're doing multiple concurrent connections and jumbo frames.

As for offload performance, the only virtualization network offload feature in Hyper-V R2 is VMQ. It doesn't really make much of a different on 1G adapters (unless you have a specific payload), but it is required to get 10G scaling.
 
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