Accelerated Data Plane Performance Using Enhanced Data Path in NUMA Architecture

Authors: Jambi Ganbar (Sr. Technical Solutions Manager, NFV), Jubin Thomas (NSX Information Experience team)

Overview

Some workloads demand accelerated and predictable networking performance.  Our Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) customers and some of our financial, media, and high-performance computing (HPC) customers deploy these workloads. These workloads process a lot of network traffic. Network traffic in the virtual domain relies heavily on CPU cycles and the number of CPU cores available on the host.  These CPU resources are used by the workload to perform its task and by the hypervisor layer to deliver network traffic to and from the application.

In this blog, we discuss the configuration required to achieve accelerated data plane performance in modern multiple NUMA architecture hosts. This blog accompanies a new white paper we just released on the subject.  The white paper can be found here.

With the introduction of NSX-T version 2.2, we added a new mode of operations in the NSX-controlled virtual distributed switch. We refer to this switch as N-VDS.  This new mode is called Enhanced Data Path and is often indicated as N-VDS (E).  N-VDS (E) is one of the core building blocks in achieving accelerated data plane Continue reading