Which hardware acceleration feature in virtual machine settings enhances vNIC performance by directly delivering packets from the external network to the vNIC?

The feature that enhances vNIC performance by enabling the direct delivery of packets from the external network to the virtual network interface card (vNIC) is Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ). VMQ is designed to improve network throughput and performance in virtualized environments by distributing incoming network traffic among multiple processors in the host. This allows each vNIC to handle packets independently without the overhead of going through the hypervisor, effectively reducing latency and increasing overall network performance.

In scenarios where multiple virtual machines are running on a single physical server, VMQ helps in optimizing the processing of network packets by utilizing multi-core processors. By queuing the incoming network packets into separate queues based on the destination MAC address, VMQ enables the efficient distribution of the processing load across the available CPU cores, which can significantly enhance the throughput of virtualized network environments.

Other features in this context, such as NIC Teaming, aim to provide redundancy and load balancing but do not specifically target packet delivery efficiency in the way VMQ does. TCP Offload Engine is more related to offloading TCP processing from the CPU to the NIC, which does not directly entail packet delivery to the vNIC. Similarly, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) focuses on fast packet processing but is not