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VMs – Gotta love them.

I like playing with Virtual Machines. I like playing with Virtual Hosts. In fact, 90% of my servers are all VM based at the office. It makes business sense to go virtual when the positives far outweighs the negatives.

The ability to swap between them when failure occurs in the blink of an eye is such a great advantage, any business who has not looked at going this direction is shooting themselves in the foot.

Unless specific requirements are needed, I prefer creating VMs that have “host only” communication. This way I can lock away what needs to be locked and NAT what needs to be seen. One of the issues that I have run into when going the “host only” route is that some installations throughput is seriously lacking with the speed cracking. A little bit of scratching showed me that it was Microsoft Windows(2008 and up) trying to be [their version of] clever by doing some TCP off loading(among others).

This becomes a problem when speed is exactly what the doctor ordered. How did I get around it?

Easy, follow these steps:

 

  1. Create a backup of your Registry (Microsoft’s HowTo Backup Registry)
  2. Open your registry (START –> RUN –> regedit.exe –> OK/RUN/ENTER)
  3. Find the following Registry section: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
  4. Add the following into the above section:

Value =DisableTaskOffload
Type = DWORD
Data = 1

Value =EnableTCPChimney
Type = DWORD
Data = 0

Value =EnableTCPA
Type = DWORD
Data = 0

Value =EnableRSS
Type = DWORD
Data = 0

PLEASE NOTE: You have to reboot your system to apply the changes. 

That’s it!

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to ask.

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