A Linux VM provides services for multiple clients on a single large subnet.

Nutanix AHV networking documentation explains that high-connection-count workloads can saturate a single network queue, causing receive-side bottlenecks. VirtIO-Net supports Multi-Queue with Receive-Side Scaling (RSS), allowing the VM to distribute packet processing across multiple vCPUs. The documentation states, “Enabling RSS Multi-Queue improves performance for workloads handling a large number of simultaneous network flows by parallelizing packet handling.”

Trunk mode does not solve per-queue packet processing limitations. Adding vNICs is not recommended because the bottleneck is at the queue level, not the number of interfaces. Using the e1000 adapter results in lower performance compared to VirtIO and is discouraged. Therefore, enabling RSS Multi-Queue is the correct performance optimization for a VM handling thousands of client connections.