Azure Hybrid & Cloud Migration Blog

Author: Zahir Hussain Shah MVP Exchange Server

Improve Microsoft Hyper-V Server Networking Performance for Microsoft Exchange Server Virtualization, and in general

Recently, while I kicked off the Installation and Configuration of our HP c7000 Blade Systems for building Microsoft Hyper-V Servers, as the first layer of Virtualized Infrastructure for our Internal Cloud (aka Private Cloud) implementation, so I tried to search for How to optimizing / improving the network performance of a Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and then I came to know the series of article from Cristian Edwards, where he documented the various elements of a Windows Server, which can be tweaked to get the better performance from a Microsoft Windows Server, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server in particular.

You can visit the below links to see the each part of his series of article for Hyper-V Network Optimization:

Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 1 of 6 (TCP Chimney Offload)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 2 of 6 (VMQ)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 3 of 6 (RSS)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 4 of 6 (Jumbo Frames)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 5 of 6 (Features compatibility matrix)
Hyper-V Networking Optimizations Part 6 of 6 (Monitoring Hyper-V Network consumption)

Note: There is a link to a Microsoft PowerShell Script Advanced_NetFeature.ps1, he wrote, which provides a nifty overview of the different TCP /Network level settings on your Server, you can download it and run in on the server before, you perform any of modification for the Network level settings.

Below are the links to my past blog post, in which I explained the best practices for Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 on Hyper-V in particular, and if you want, you can also apply these recommendation on any of the Hypervisor you use to virtualize the Exchange Server.

Solution: Exchange 2010 SP1 OWA is slow on Hyper-V | Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 slow response

Solution: Install and Configure Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) for Hyper-V Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs for Exchange 2010 SP1 Client Access Servers

I hope this post would be help for you, and will provide a nifty way to improve the network performance of our Hyper-V Servers.

Cheers!