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Scalable Networking Pack revisited for 2008

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A customer of mine has been enquiring about the current situation of Scalable Networking Pack in relation to Windows 2008. Out of my research I have come up with the following information plus also some recommendations.

After Windows 2003 SP2  this setting was enabled by default. Many customers experienced some issues https://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496/jp. This was related to the fact that certain NIC cards especially Broadcom had compatibility issues with  Network cards using Broadcom 5708 chipsets are known to have compatibility issues w/ TCP Chimney Offload feature.

 https://blogs.msdn.com/sqlprogrammability/archive/2008/05/27/sql-server-intermittent-connectivity-issue.aspx & https://blogs.technet.com/networking/archive/2008/11/14/the-effect-of-tcp-chimney-offload-on-viewing-network-traffic.aspx and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/942861

It was therefore advisable  to “Switch off” the SNP via this registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

EnableTCPA          REG_DWORD       0x0          ßOK

EnableRSS                              REG_DWORD       0x0          ßOK

EnableTCPChimney            REG_DWORD       0x0          ßOK

0 = disabled

1 = enabled default

With the release of 2008 I have been asked by my customer whether this is an issue still.

Well the answer is that potentially it could be , however to mitigate the issue ensure that you have the LATEST NIC card drivers as part of your server build, and checkout their comptibility with TCP Chimney Offload feature

Windows 2008 specific reference to Scalable Networking Pack.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/951037

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