Converged NIC Configuration Guide for Windows Server 2016

If you have workloads that require low latency and you're using separate network adapters for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Ethernet traffic loads, you'll be interested in the new feature Converged network interface card (NIC) in Windows Server 2016.

Converged NIC allows you to expose RDMA through a host-partition virtual NIC (vNIC) so that the host partition services can access Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) on the same NICs that the Hyper-V guests are using for TCP/IP traffic.

Prior to the Converged NIC feature, management (host partition) services that wanted to use RDMA were required to use dedicated RDMA-capable NICs, even if bandwidth was available on the NICs that were bound to the Hyper-V Virtual Switch.

With Converged NIC, the two workloads (management users of RDMA and Guest traffic) can share the same physical NICs, allowing you to install fewer NICs in your servers.

When you deploy Converged NIC with Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V hosts and Hyper-V Virtual Switches, the vNICs in the Hyper-V hosts expose RDMA services to host processes using RDMA over over any Ethernet-based RDMA technology.

For more information, see Converged Network Interface Card (NIC) Configuration Guide in the Windows Server 2016 Technical Library.