Synthetic Device Drivers

Both the Hyper-V and the VMware virtualization products contain emulated and synthetic device drivers. Emulated drivers were the original approach to virtualization; in this approach each hard disk or network adapter assigned to a virtual machine is emulated in software. The advantage of emulated drivers is that almost all operating systems contain support for these drivers because the network adapter driver emulates a baseline set of capabilities. Synthetic drivers are used to provide an additional level of performance and capabilities within a virtual machine such as jumbo frames or TCP offloading features.

With Lync Server 2013, deployments always use a synthetic network adapter to achieve the best possible performance.