Disable NIC Power Management in Exchange best practice

The NIC Power Management in every Exchange Server should be disabled. It does not matter if you have Exchange Server running physically or virtual. The NIC Management is a configuration on the Operating System (OS). In this article, you will learn how to disable the NIC Power Management in Exchange Server.

Why you should turn off the NIC Power Management in Exchange

The Exchange Team at Microsoft has written the article Do you have a sleepy NIC? They do recommend to disable the NIC Power Management.

In a Database Availability Group (DAG), if your databases are randomly mounting or flipping from one server to another, for no apparent reason (including across datacenters) you may be suffering from your network interface card (NIC) going to sleep. And that’s not a good thing.

Disable NIC Power Management with GUI

Open the device manager on the Exchange Server. Next, expand the section for Network Adapters. In our example, we have the vmxnet3 Ethernet Adapter. That’s because we are running Exchange Server in a VMware virtual machine.

Right-click the Ethernet Adapter and click Properties.

In the Properties window, select the Power Management tab. Uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Click OK to apply the settings.

NIC Power Management is turned off.

NIC Power Management tab missing

Are you missing the Power Management tab? It means that the NIC is not able to sleep. You’re all set.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned how to Disable NIC Power Management in Exchange best practices. Open the Ethernet Adapter and go to the Power Management tab. After that, disable the setting.

An excellent way is to run the Exchange Server Health Checker PowerShell script. It helps detect common configuration issues that cause performance issues and other long-running issues caused by a simple configuration change within an Exchange Environment. It also helps collect useful information about your server to help speed up common information-gathering of your server.

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