Now that the veil of silence has been lifted with the release of Windows Server “8” beta , I’m able to tell you a little more about what I’ve been working on for 5 years now. An inside joke is that it’s a feature with two...

In part 1 , I discussed why Microsoft has been investing in SR-IOV for device I/O from virtual machines. The key points were to reduce latency, increase throughput, lower compute overhead, and for future scalability. Part two takes a look at SR-IOV from...

In parts 1 through 4 , I covered the external dependencies and the “why” of SR-IOV. So it’s about time I showed you how to setup SR-IOV and what it looks like in a little more detail from a configuration perspective, both through the...

This part of the series is all about determining why SR-IOV may not be operational. As you will discover, there are several reasons, some of them obvious if you’ve followed all the parts so far, some more subtle. By the end of this part, you will be an...

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the “why” question, and the hardware aspects of SR-IOV, and identified that to use SR-IOV in Hyper-V it is necessary to have system hardware support in the form of an IOMMU device, and a PCI Express device which...

Summarising the series so far, we’ve answered “Why SR-IOV?”, looked at hardware and firmware dependencies, and run through the user interface and PowerShell cmdlets to configure SR-IOV. Next on the agenda is how SR-IOV and Live Migration...

So far in this series, we have discussed the “why” question, and identified three dependencies for SR-IOV in Hyper-V in Windows Server “8” beta: System hardware support in the form of an IOMMU device A PCI Express networking...

Only a few more topics in this series remain uncovered. This part of the series looks at resiliency with SR-IOV. By resiliency, I mean, of course, NIC teaming, otherwise known as Load Balancing/Failover (LBFO), the ability to aggregate network links or...