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Scalable Networking Pack revisited for 2008 - COULD STILL BE ISSUES!!

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A number of customers have been enquiring about the current situation of our Scalable Networking Pack in relation to Windows 2008 and thanks to Jane Lewis of the UK PFE team for running the ground work on this.  So, Info and recommendations are as follows;

With Windows 2003 SP2  this setting was enabled by default.   Many customers experienced issues post deployment and https://support.microsoft.com/kb/948496/jp. This was related to the fact that certain NIC cards especially Broadcom had some major compatibility issues.  Network cards using Broadcom 5708 chipsets are known to have compatibility issues with the TCP Chimney Offload feature set and many a blog has been written around these issues;

 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 many of my customers whether this remains an issue.

Well the answer is that IT COULD WELL BE! , however to mitigate the issue ensure that you have the LATEST NIC card drivers included as part of your server build, and checkout their comptibility with TCP Chimney Offload feature with the NIC Vendors

Windows 2008 specific reference to Scalable Networking Pack.

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

As always - feedback welcome from the field