Chimney and TCPOffload on Hyper-V

Lately there have been a bunch of issues that folks are running into regarding TCPOffloading on Hyper-V server.

This is not a new issue to Windows Servers.  This is an old tweak that goes back a long time.  And disalbing the TCPOffloading options on Application Servers, Terminal Servers, SQL Servers, etc. has been a pretty common practice for years.

The biggest confusion of late has come form Chimney offloading and TCPOffloading – they are not the same thing.

Chimney is a new feature with Windows 2008 R2 and adds a great deal of performance improvement in a very few cases – it does not kick in all the time or for all traffic.

Chimney and the TCPOffloading that we are referring to is not the same thing.  The cases where Chimney actually kicks in are really pretty small, the vast majority of the time it is never touched.
Leaving Chimney on very rarely has a negative impact.
TCPOffloading (checksum, large send, etc.) can cause problems.  As it does more to affect how packets flow.

TCPOffloading includes the older functions; checksum, large send, etc.

To disable TCPOffload on Hyper-V Server or Server Core:

Check this out:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservercore/thread/d0c55df9-a27c-4876-bc5a-8ac7f1b46462

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa938424.aspx

Chimney and the TCPOffloading that we are referring to is not the same thing.  The cases where Chimney actually kicks in are really pretty small, the vast majority of the time it is never touched.

Leaving Chimney on very rarely has a negative impact.
TCPOffloading (checksum, large send, etc.) can cause problems.  As it does more to affect how packets flow.

To disable Chimney (which you most likely would never need to do):

netsh interface tcp set global chimney=disabled