Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) Overview
The NDIS Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ) interface supports Microsoft Hyper-V network performance improvements in NDIS 6.20 and later in Windows Server 2008 R2 and later versions of Windows Server.
The VMQ interface supports:
Classification of received packets in network adapter hardware by using the destination media access control (MAC) address to route the packets to different receive queues.
Shared memory; For more information see NDIS Memory Management Interface.
Scaling to multiple processors by processing packets for different virtual machines on different processors.
The NDIS VMQ architecture provides advantages for virtualization such as:
Virtualization impacts performance and VMQ helps overcome those effects.
VMQ supports live migration.
VMQ coexists with NDIS task offloads and other optimizations.
This section provides high-level information about the NDIS VMQ interface. You should read this section before writing an NDIS driver that supports VMQ.
For information about writing VMQ drivers, see Writing VMQ Drivers.
Note
Be sure to study the NDIS Virtual Miniport Driver sample, especially the vmq.c and vmq.h source files.
This section includes the following topics:
Introduction to NDIS Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ)
Security Issues with NDIS Virtual Machine (VM) Shared Memory
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