VMQ Components

The following illustration shows the relationships among the various components in a virtual machine queue (VMQ) operating environment.

The preceding figure illustrates the following VMQ components:

Network Virtual Service Provider (NetVSP)
An NDIS driver that runs in the management operating system of the Hyper-V parent partition. This driver provides services to support networking access by the Hyper-V child partitions.

Note  Starting with Windows Server 2008, the Hyper-V extensible switch component provides NetVSP support to the NetVSC components that run in the guest operating system. For more information about this component, see Hyper-V Extensible Switch.

Network Virtual Service Client (NetVSC)
An NDIS driver that runs in the guest operating system of a Hyper-V child partition. NetVSC exposes a virtualized view of the physical network adapter on the host computer. This virtualized device is known as the VM network adapter.

The NetVSC provides the following functionality:

• Supports networking device functionality in Hyper-V child partitions.

• Accesses the physical network adapter by passing messages over the virtual machine bus (VMBus) to the associated NetVSP driver. This driver runs in the management operating system of the Hyper-V parent partition.

Virtual Machine Bus (VMBus)
A virtual communications bus that passes control and data messages between the Hyper-V parent and child partitions.

Note  In Hyper-V, a child partition is also known as a virtual machine (VM).

VM Bus Channel
A communications channel on the VMBus between a NetVSC in a Hyper-V child partition and the NetVSP in the Hyper-V parent partition.

VM Queue
A queue for received data. A network adapter that supports VMQ has hardware to route data to a VM queue.

VMQ Filter
A filter to test incoming data. A network adapter that supports VMQ uses filters to test packet data in order to assign the packet to a queue.