[Xen-users] Increasing network performance on Windows DomUs

[Adam Wead <awead@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm preparing to deploy some Windows servers under Xen on Red Hat 5  
and would like to maximize network performance.  I've been looking  
over some previous posts and it looks like the present situation is  
this, and please do correct me if I'm wrong:
- Windows guests get slower network performance than their Dom0's  
because of the fully-virtualized hardware (HVM)
- Assigning the Dom0 and DomU its own processor core can improve this  
slightly
- It's possible to use Windows paravirtual (PV) drivers from  
XenExpress or other commercial products, but they will only work with  
commercial versions of Xen and not open-source ones such as Red Hat's  
version
If the last point is true, what options are there?  If I have a Dom0  
machine with lots of NICs, can I assign one of the NICs to my DomU and  
bypass the whole HVM, network bridge, etc?  At this point, I'm only  
interested in getting one of the windows guests with optimal network  
speed.  For now, I can deal with less-than-optical network performance  
on my other windows guests, but it would be nice to know all the  
options.
Here are some details about my environment:

Dom0 = IBM 3550, Dual-core 3.0 Ghz Xeon
DomU = 2 paravirtual linux guests. 1 fully-virtual Windows 2008 Server

Right now, an iperf test to a server on the same subnet yields 850 Mb/ 
s from either Dom0 or one of the linux DomUs, but only about 30 Mb/s  
from the Windows DomU.
Any ideas will be greatly appreciated, and I'm happy to share the  
results.
thanks,

...adam

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