New DCB and vRSS Networking Docs for Windows Server 2016

As we approach the summer, we have some new Network Offload and Optimization technology documentation to share with you.

If you aren't familiar with Data Center Bridging (DCB) , it is a suite of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards that enable Converged Fabrics in the data center, where storage, data networking, cluster Inter-Process Communication (IPC), and management traffic all share the same Ethernet network infrastructure.

DCB provides hardware-based bandwidth allocation to a specific type of network traffic, and enhances Ethernet transport reliability with the use of priority-based flow control.+

Hardware-based bandwidth allocation is essential if traffic bypasses the operating system and is offloaded to a converged network adapter, which might support Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Ethernet, or Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

Priority-based flow control is essential if the upper layer protocol, such as Fiber Channel, assumes a lossless underlying transport.

And if you haven't used Virtual Receive Side Scaling (vRSS) before, you can use the technology to configure a virtual network adapter to load balance incoming network traffic across multiple logical processor cores in a virtual machine (VM), or across multiple physical cores for a host virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC).

This configuration allows the load from a virtual network adapter to be distributed across multiple virtual processors in a VM, allowing the VM to process more network traffic more rapidly than it can with a single logical processor.

For more information, see the following documentation sets in the Windows Server 2016 Technical Library on docs.microsoft.com.