Hyper-V with VMQ

Operating Systems: Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016.

Mellanox WinOF includes a Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) interface to support Microsoft Hyper-V network performance improvements and security enhancement.

VMQ interface supports:

  • Classification of received packets by using the destination MAC address to route the packets to different receive queues

  • NIC ability to use DMA to transfer packets directly to a Hyper-V child-partition's shared memory

  • Scaling to multiple processors, by processing packets for different virtual machines on different processors.

To enable Hyper-V with VMQ using UI:

  1. Open Hyper-V Manager.

  2. Right-click the desired Virtual Machine (VM), and left-click Settings in the pop-up menu.

  3. In the Settings window, under the relevant network adapter, select "Hardware Acceleration".

  4. Check/uncheck the box “Enable virtual machine queue” to enable/disable VMQ on that specific network adapter.

To enable Hyper-V with VMQ using PowerShell:

  1. Enable VMQ on a specific VM: Set-VMNetworkAdapter <VM Name> -VmqWeight 100

  2. Disable VMQ on a specific VM: Set-VMNetworkAdapter <VM Name> -VmqWeight 0

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