Slow network in Virtual Machines on Hyper-v 2012R2

While working on a Hyper-V project I was noticing that the virtual machines had very sluggish network performance. This was a brand new enviroment with a good bandwidth so therefore I was a bit stumped on why the Network was acting so sluggish.

After doing some testing we saw that the hyper-v host had about 100mbit access to the internet and low latency on the link. The virtual machine that was running on it with a shared network card has about 1/3 of the speed and was getting quite high latency when accessing the internet.

After playing around with the Network driver I tried disabling VMQ on the card and voila! everything worked perfectly. When I saw it was a Broadcom driver and did a quick google search I found that there is a known issue with Broadcom network adapter drivers and VMQ

You can read more about it here –> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2902166

So if you are having trouble with virtual machines and sluggish network performance with Broadcom drivers, try disabling VMQ Smilefjes

NOTE: I had added the latest Broadcom drivers to the hyper-v host but they did not fix the issue, I contacted Broadcom which gave me a hotfix which I used in this instance.

0 thoughts on “Slow network in Virtual Machines on Hyper-v 2012R2”

  1. I believe this was fixed in a driver update last year? Did you use the latest Broadcom drivers?

    1. Hi Håvard,

      thanks for the feedback, i’m updating the blog as we speak. But in this case I needed to obtain a hotfix from Broadcom since the latest drivers did not fix the issue.

  2. Instead of disabling VMQ I would recommend to install the latest Broadcom firmware and drivers; that will fix the VMQ issue. Latest Broadcom firmware and drivers can be obtained through support pages of your server manufacturer; in my case DELL.

    1. Hi Chris,

      thanks for the feedback, im updating the blog as we speak. But in this case I needed to obtain a hotfix from Broadcom since the latest drivers did not fix the issue.

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