As we approach the summer, we have some new Network Offload and Optimization technology documentation to share with you.
If you aren’t familiar with Data Center Bridging (DCB), it is a suite of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards that enable Converged Fabrics in the data center, where storage, data networking, cluster Inter-Process Communication (IPC), and management traffic all share the same Ethernet network infrastructure.
DCB provides hardware-based bandwidth allocation to a specific type of network traffic, and enhances Ethernet transport reliability with the use of priority-based flow control.+
Hardware-based bandwidth allocation is essential if traffic bypasses the operating system and is offloaded to a converged network adapter, which might support Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Ethernet, or Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
Priority-based flow control is essential if the upper layer protocol, such as Fiber Channel, assumes a lossless underlying transport.
And if you haven’t used Virtual Receive Side Scaling (vRSS) before, you can use the technology to configure a virtual network adapter to load balance incoming network traffic across multiple logical processor cores in a virtual machine (VM), or across multiple physical cores for a host virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC).
This configuration allows the load from a virtual network adapter to be distributed across multiple virtual processors in a VM, allowing the VM to process more network traffic more rapidly than it can with a single logical processor.
For more information, see the following documentation sets in the Windows Server 2016 Technical Library on docs.microsoft.com.