SmartNICs - Paving the Way for 25G/40G/50G/100G Speed NFV Deployments in OpenStack
Red Hat and Netronome will address the growing demand for higher performance from the NFV datapath
NFV applications running on virtualized infrastructure in OpenStack today must achieve 10G linerate. Mobile application VNF vendors demanding higher speeds with 25G, 40G & 100G links to server.
Accelerated datapath options today and what lies ahead
- SR-IOV (in deployment) - bare-metal performance, switching operations (filtering, tunneling, bonding) requires external switch(ToR), VM-to-VM requires hair-pinning at ToR
- DPDK accelerated openvswitch (OVS-DPDK) (PoC trials) - multiple cores to achieve 10G line rate; vswitch supports bonding, firewall, conntrack, tunneling, live migration, but at extra cost
- SmartNIC Offload (PoC trials) - offload of OVS flows from vswitch to a SmartNIC eswitch; support for OVS flow match/action, firewall filtering, tunneling, bonding, NAT, conntrack. Selective acceleration with fallback to vswitch(slow-path). Bare-metal performance, no overhead
