Tip of the Day: Disabling RSS when Configuring VMQ
Today’s Tip… Disabling RSS when Configuring VMQ
Today’s tip provides you a little bit of a preview of things to come on the newly updated Networking Blog page. Recently, articles containing outdated information were removed when the blog was migrated to its new home. One example was a series of much loved deep-dive articles on Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ). I’m happy to report that work is ongoing for a completely updated set of articles on this topic and more.
While we wait, let’s look at one of the implementation recommendations you can expect to see.
Background reading on the technologies discussed in today’s tip:
The dilemma:
We’ve seen people recommend that RSS be disabled when setting up VMQ. One statement you can expect to see in the first VMQ article (link coming soon) is that this is no longer supported.
We do not support disabling RSS for a couple of reasons:
- Disabling RSS disables it for every adapter. Any adapter not attached to the virtual switch can use RSS and as such would be negatively impacted by this change.
- As you’ll see in future articles, there is a budding friendship between these two technologies. They’ll soon become fast friends...like Peanut Butter and Jelly, Wooster and Jeeves, or Chopin and Liszt.
Important: Disabling RSS is not a supported production configuration on Windows. RSS can be temporarily disabled by Microsoft Support recommendation during troubleshooting for the purposes of verifying whether there is an issue with the feature. In the rare case where RSS causes a problem, the root cause of the issue needs to be addressed. RSS should not be left permanently disabled as it would leave Windows in an unsupported state.
Keep an eye out on the Networking Blog page for more to come.