RSS issues at Windows 2012 R2 with VMXNET3 and 10.2.0 VM Tools - still not resolved?

[akobus]

Hi,

I try to enable RSS on Windows 2012 R2 servers running VMXNET3.

The case is that I have 5 servers where I want to enable RSS on. All vm's are more or less the same spec. (+-vCPU, Memory). All of them have >=4 logical CPU.

I of course had issues with the very old vm drivers/tools running so I failed at the first attempt. After upgrading VM tools to 10.1.7 I managed to enable RSS on the first server. Success!

...but I failed on the next ones and can't force them to be capable of RSS. I went thru all the steps enabling TCP global settings + enabling on the NIC Advanced setting.

Finally I've installed the latest VM Tools 10.2.0 but it still did not help. In fact I managed to effectively enable it at one more server but as part of the troubleshooting I lost it.

What I did was: netsh int tcp set global RSS=Disable at the stage when it worked (state as above), but the netsh int tcp set global RSS=Enable didn't bring it back as I expected.

Currently all the servers are running 10.2.0 Tools with VMXNET driver 1.7.3.7 but only one has RSS Capable = True and IndirectionTable filled in when I run the PowerShell cmdlets.

Any advices on what should be checked more? Should VM tools 10.2.0 solve all the issues with VMXNET3 and RSS on Server 2012 R2?

[parmarr]

Follow the steps mentioned in this KB to enable RSS https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2008925

[nilsam]

Try running this in powershell as administrator:

Get-NetAdapterRss | Set-NetAdapterRss -Enabled $false

Get-NetAdapterRss | Set-NetAdapterRss -Enabled $true

I struggle with enabling RSS on a Windows Server 2012R2 VM. I have followed all the steps in VMware Knowledge Base  without success.

What else can I try?

[carvaled]

There is a known issue on Windows 8 and Windows 2012 Server or later

• The vmxnet3 driver version is 1.6.6.0 up to 1.7.3.0
• The installed VMware Tools are 9.10.0 up to 10.1.5

Have a look at this VMware Knowledge Base

Hopefully it helps

vMan