NOTE: It is recommended to use the latest network adapter drivers for your Dell™ PowerEdge™ system running Microsoft® Hyper-V® Server 2008 downloaded from the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.
NOTE: Dell does not support drivers obtained from third-party vendors. These applications can be used to configure physical network adapters that are not connected to the virtual networks.
Hyper-V supports all network adapters recommended for Dell systems running the Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 x64 operating system.
Supported Physical Network Adapter Settings
Guest operating systems are able to utilize physical devices present in a system, including some of the advanced features of these devices.
NOTE: When you configure physical network adapters for virtual networking in the Hyper-V environment, some functionality of the physical network adapters may not be accessible to the virtual networks.
Generally, physical network adapter features can be grouped into two categories: stateless and stateful.
Stateless — Only stateless features may be leveraged for virtual networks. These features include Large Send Offload (LSO), Checksum Offload (CSO), and VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.1Q).
NOTE: Hyper-V does not support LSO and CSO in an IPv6 network.
Stateful — Stateful off-load features such as Broadcom® TCP offload engine (TOE) and Intel® I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) are not leveraged by the Hyper-V virtual network. These features are not leveraged even if they are enabled on the physical adapter that is connected to the virtual network. However, network adapters connected exclusively to the parent partition network adapter may still access all physical network adapter features including TOE and I/OAT, as supported by the system and network adapters.
Stateless Offload (LSO and CSO)
The adapters provide the LSO and CSO capabilities if both the network adapters and drivers support them. If the network adapters or the drivers do not support these features, then these capabilities are still available, but performed by the operating system. It is recommended to use adapters with LSO and CSO capabilities as some overhead is incurred when the operating system provides these capabilities.
NOTE: The latest Dell-supported network adapters offer LSO and CSO hardware offload support. Hyper-V does not support CSO and LSO in an IPv6 network. In an IPv6 network, a team that supports CSO and/or LSO, and is bound to a Hyper-V virtual network, reports CSO and LSO as an offload capability in Broadcom Advanced Control Suite (BACS), even when CSO and LSO do not work. This is a limitation of Hyper-V.
VLAN Tagging
VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.1Q) of Hyper-V is supported. It allows both parent partition and VMs to logically separate their network connections. VMs may have more than one virtual adapter, and each virtual adapter may belong to any VLAN.
Supported Physical Network Adapter Settings
Table 3-1 summarizes the physical network adapter features supported by Hyper-V when connected to a virtual network.
NOTE: Network adapters not connected to virtual networks may be used for advanced features offered by third-party software from Intel and Broadcom. However, you must not use this software to manage or configure physical network adapters connected to virtual networks.
Table 3-1. Physical NIC Support Features Matrix for Hyper-V Virtual Networks
Stateless Features (Supported)
Stateful Features (Not Supported)
LSO
802.1p (QoS)
CSO
Receive-Side Scaling (RSS)
VLAN Tagging (within Hyper-V)
Flow Control
Teaming with one primary and one standby adapter
Jumbo Frames
Wake-On-LAN
TOE
VLAN Tagging (within third-party software)
Network MAC Address
NOTE: For configuring NIC team and VLAN, the minimum supported driver version for the Broadcom NIC is 12.6 and for Intel NIC is 11.0. It is recommended that you download the latest drivers from the Dell Support website at support.dell.com.
NOTE: Hyper-V cannot manage tagging when using a teaming software. Instead, the teaming software can be used for VLAN tagging.
