oVirt Now Supports OVS-DPDK

DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) provides high-performance packet processing libraries and user space drivers. Open vSwitch uses DPDK libraries to perform entirely within the user space. According to Intel ONP performance tests, using OVS with DPDK can provide a huge performance enhancement, increasing network packet throughput and reducing latency.

OVS-DPDK has been added to the oVirt Master branch as an experimental feature. The following post describes the OVS-DPDK installation and configuration procedures.

Please note: Accessing the OVS-DPDK feature requires installing the oVirt Master version. In addition, OVS-DPDK cannot access any features located within the Linux kernel. This includes Linux bridge, tun/tap devices, iptables, etc.

Requirements

In order to achieve the best performance, please follow the instructions at: http://dpdk.org/doc/guides-16.11/linux_gsg/nic_perf_intel_platform.html

The network card must be on the supported vendor matrix, located here: http://dpdk.org/doc/nics

Ensure that your system supports 1GB hugepages: grep -q pdpe1gb /proc/cpuinfo && echo "1GB supported"

• Hardware support: Make sure VT-d / AMD-Vi is enabled in BIOS
• Kernel support: When adding a new host via the oVirt GUI, go to Hosts -> Edit > Kernel, and add the following parameters to the Kernel command line: iommu=pt intel_iommu=on default_hugepagesz=1GB hugepagesz=1G hugepages=N In the event that 1GB Continue reading