Exam Prep for 70-659 Part 7: Configuring Child Network Adapters
As I wrote in an earlier post, there is no better time to write your exam for 70-659 Windows Server 2008 R2, Server Virtualization, than now and particularly before May 31, 2012. So to aid in that endeavour, Joseph Yedid, an IT specialist with Enhansoft in Ottawa, has put together a series of posts focused on getting IT folk ready to pass this exam. Joseph writes his blog at www.josephyedid.com but has allowed me to repost this series here.
Configuring Child Network Adapters
There are two types of network adapters that you can use in VMs; synthetic and emulated.
Synthetic network adapters are made available when the integration components are installed. Synthetic network adapters offer the best performance between the two available adapter types.
Legacy network adapters are emulated. This means that the processing is done by the VM worker process of the parent partition. Legacy network adapters have a few drawbacks however, slower performance due to processing and increased resource usage. Even with these drawbacks, there are still reasons you would use them. For example, in order to use PXE, you would need a legacy network adapter. Synthetic network adapters do not support PXE. Also some legacy operating systems don’t support synthetic network adapters, such as NT4.0.
In the settings for the VM, under Add Hardware, you will see Network Adapter (synthetic) and Legacy Network Adapter.
To configure MAC spoofing, open the settings of a VM and go to the Network Adapter settings.
You might use MAC address spoofing in a virtualized NLB scenario.
Configuring VLAN IDs was covered in a previous section.
What are Jumbo Frames? Jumbo Frames or Jumbo Packets allow for increased sizes of MTU packets. For Jumbo Frames to properly function, both ends of transmission must have this enabled. How does this effect Hyper-V? Larger packet sizes ensure more information gets to its destination. This also increases operation speed and performance. Good candidates for Jumbo Frames are virtual machine networking and cluster networking. Configuring Jumbo Frames is done within the NIC properties page; see below image.
TCP Offloading Engine (TOE) or TCP Chimney allow for the physical NIC to take some of the processing load off of the CPU. This is configured in the properties page of the NIC; see image below.
Joseph Yedid is an IT specialist working at Enhansoft a company based in Ottawa, Canada, that develops products and services to extend the value of System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM) and System Center Configuration Manager 2012. He is an avid user of technology and is certified in many areas of Microsoft infrastructure technologies. He is MCTS and MCITP certifed - Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista/Windows 7. Other interests revolve around virtualization technologies, System Center and Private Cloud. Joseph is a member and on the executive of the Ottawa Windows Server User Group.