Test Layout

We work with Dell servers and they come with Broadcom network cards. In general they work well, but they have an issue when being used as Hyper-V hosts. Virtual machine queues which in theory improve performance end up bogging down networking. Symptoms we've seen: Slow file copying to/from VMs over the network. Dropped network connection for entire host that is fixed by reboot. In both cases the fix is to disable virtual machine queues (VMQ). We had been doing it in the properties of the physical network on the Hyper-V host. However, we were recently having issues with a host and that option wasn't in the interface provided by the driver. Some blogs were referring to using registry edits to disable it. However, a faster and easier way in Windows Server 2012 R2 (maybe also Windows Server 2012, but I haven't verified) is by using Windows PowerShell. To view the VMQ status of your network adapters: Get-NetAdapterVmq To disable VMQ for all adapters: Get-NetAdapterVmq | Disable-

I normally focus on troubleshooting with my blog posts, but this one is an exception. I wrote up a section for course manual on BitLocker in Windows 10 that includes a couple of short activities enabling BitLocker. However, I'm concerned that that activities could take an extended period of time. So, this blog post is providing screenshots of what those activities look like. Before I start with the steps, I was pleasantly surprised that I was easily able to get BitLocker going in a VM without doing anything goofy. Once upon a time, to get BitLocker going, we needed to use a virtual floppy to store the startup key. There is now an option to use a password instead. I haven't looked at this in a while and this is probably not a new option. I'm going to guess that Windows 8.1 at least probably had the same. There are three nice things about a startup password for BitLocker: You don't need a TPM in your computer to make it work. Many computers don't have a TPM so that re