OpenStack for Telco NFV Cloud deployment is rapidly gaining momentum, however Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are pushing the limits on the network and demanding a feature rich high performance datapath. The OpenStack, Open vSwitch and Linux communities have upstreamed open APIs for SmartNICs, enabling high-throughput low-latency datapath with minimal performance tuning and the ability to manipulate inner packet headers providing services like firewall DDoS protection, Quality of Service (QoS) marking and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). These upstream integrated changes are emerging in stable open source distros with no custom patches and no vendor lock-in, supported by multiple SmartNIC vendors and SDN controllers. This is opening new flow processing possibilities, while freeing up expensive CPU resources for running application workloads. In this session, we demonstrate out-of-the-box fast data path functional progress and performance results achieved with OpenStack SmartNICs running VNF workloads at 10/25/50/100G, comparing vanilla OVS, OVS over DPDK and Full OVS offloads. Notably, our results run Nuage Networks Virtualized Cloud Services (SDN) on vanilla distros without kernel modifications or driver patches.
