VMQ

Dynamic VMQ

Pankaj Garg

After working in the hypervisor team for few years, during Windows 8 time frame, I decided to move back to networking as a lead, to lead the increased investments in networking. We built a lot of features such as SR-IOV support, Dynamic VMQ, Extensible Virtual Switch etc.

In this post I would talk about a feature we built called dynamic VMQ, a feature designed to provide optimal processor utilization across changing workload that was not possible with static processor allocation for VMQ as done in Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008 R2 release). However, before we dig deeper into dynamic VMQ, let me recap the processor utilization for no VMQ and static VMQ cases. (more…)

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Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ)

Pankaj Garg

In my last post, I talked about how various NIC offloads are supported in VMSWITCH to provide high performance network device virtualization. In this post, I would talk about another networking performance technique called virtual machine queues (or VMQ).

Background

In Windows networking stack, to utilize multiple processors in a machine, a feature called RSS (or receive side scaling) is used. This feature was co-developed by Microsoft working with hardware partners. It provides two main features:

  • It allows incoming traffic to be put on different queues that get processed on different processors based on TCP/UDP stream information i.e. source and destination IP and ports.
  • It allows sent traffic to be put on specific queues and completion for sent traffic to be handled on a specific processor based on the TCP/UDP stream information.

(more…)

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