Use Windows 2008 R2 as an NFS Server for vSphere

Most people don’t realize it, but Windows 2008 R2 comes with a decent and simple to use NFS component.

This can change a simple File Server in Shared Storage for vSphere (to store ISO files, Templates or even VMs).

To start, fire up Server Manager and go the the Roles section.  Right click and select Add Roles.

Enable RSS in Guest OS with PowerCLI

If you have Windows 2003/2008 (R2) VMs with the VMXNet3 vNIC, you might want to enable RSS.

See the following article for more details and the improvements when enabling RSS.

Enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling) on Windows 2008 (R2) Virtual Machines

To enable RSS, you need to do some action inside the VM.  Luckily, this can be scripted.  Basically, we will invoke a batchfile from PowerCLI (through VMware Tools) to change a regkey which enables RSS.  This can be easily adapted to loop through all VMs and enable it on all with VMXNet3 adapters.

Enable RSS (Receive Side Scaling) on Windows 2008 (R2) Virtual Machines

A nice feature of the VMXNet3 vNIC in vSphere is Receive Side Scaling.

For detailed info, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/dd277646.

I’ll try to summarize it here:

Without RSS, all incoming network traffic is handled by CPU 0.  This could cause a bottleneck on high Network IO machines resulting in an overloaded CPU 0 (where CPU 1, 2, 3, … might be idle).  With RSS enabled, incoming network traffic is handled by all available CPUs.

RSS is available inside a VM on vSphere.  But, you’ll need to have the VMXNet3 adapter in your VM.

Let me show you how to enable this on a Windows 2008 R2 VM.