Hyper-V 2012 R2 Network Architectures Series (Part 7 of 7) – Conclusions and Summary

 

Congratulations. You reached the last of these 7 posts covering the most common Hyper-V Network Architectures today. Maybe you don’t remember all the pros/cons and caveats on each case, but don’t worry. I’ve built this table that summarizes the most important factors to consider when deciding which Hyper-V Network Architecture you want to use. As I said from the beginning, there is not one unique best practice but different options for different situations or needs. Each column in the table represents an important factor to consider and each row represents the 5 scenarios covered in the Series. I’ve added a last column to categorize each scenario based on Performance and Throughput. I find it useful to explain the differences and I hope you find it useful as well. I personally prefer the Non-Converged Network Architecture if possible and affordable but there is no reason to discard the other options if you know how the end to end solution works and how the different pieces in the backend and Windows interact with each other.

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References:

RSS and VMQ

Standardized INF Keywords for RSS

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff570864(v=vs.85).aspx

Standardized INF Keywords for VMQ

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/hh205410(v=vs.85).aspx

VMQ Deep Dive

https://blogs.technet.com/b/networking/archive/2013/09/10/vmq-deep-dive-1-of-3.aspx

https://blogs.technet.com/b/networking/archive/2013/09/24/vmq-deep-dive-2-of-3.aspx

https://blogs.technet.com/b/networking/archive/2013/10/22/vmq-deep-dive-3-of-3.aspx

NIC Teaming Whitepapers

Windows Server 2012

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30160

Windows Server 2012 R2

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40319

Hyper-V Virtual Switch

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/sdncorner/archive/2014/02/21/hyper-v-virtual-switch-architecture.aspx