Intel® Ethernet Adapters and Devices User Guide
Virtual Machine Queue Offloading
Enabling Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) offloading increases receive and transmit performance, as the adapter hardware is able to perform these tasks faster than the operating system. Offloading also frees up CPU resources. Filtering is based on MAC and/or VLAN filters.
Each Intel® Ethernet Adapter has a pool of virtual ports that are split between the various features, such as VMQ Offloading, SR-IOV, and Data Center Bridging (DCB). Increasing the number of virtual ports used for one feature decreases the number available for other features. On devices that support it, enabling DCB reduces the total pool available for other features to 32.
This does not apply to devices based on the Intel® Ethernet X710 or XL710 controllers.
Enabling VMQ Offloading in Windows
For devices that support it, VMQ offloading is enabled in the host partition in the Adapter Settings panel in Intel PROSet ACU or on the Advanced tab of the adapter’s Device Manager property sheet, under Virtualization properties.
Virtualization properties also displays the number of virtual ports available for virtual functions, and allows you to set the distribution of available virtual ports between VMQ and SR-IOV.
Teaming Considerations
If VMQ is not enabled for all adapters in a team, VMQ will be disabled for the team.
If an adapter that does not support VMQ is added to a team, VMQ will be disabled for the team.
Virtual NICs cannot be created on a team with Receive Load Balancing enabled. Receive Load Balancing is automatically disabled if you create a virtual NIC on a team.
If a team is bound to a Hyper-V virtual NIC, you cannot change the Primary or Secondary adapter.
See Adapter Teaming for more information on teams.
Virtual Machine Multiple Queues
Virtual Machine Multiple Queues (VMMQ) enables Receive Side Scaling (RSS) for virtual ports attached to a physical port. This allows RSS to be used with SR-IOV and inside a VMQ virtual machine, and offloads the RSS processing to the network adapter. RSS balances receive traffic across multiple CPUs or CPU cores. This setting has no effect if your system has only one processing unit.