Chapter 7. Performance

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 director configures the Compute nodes to enforce resource partitioning and fine tuning to achieve line rate performance for the guest VNFs. The key performance factors in the NFV use case are throughput, latency and jitter.

DPDK-accelerated OVS enables high performance packet switching between physical NICs and virtual machines. OVS 2.6 embeds support for DPDK 16.04 and includes support for vhost-user multiqueue allowing scalable performance. OVS-DPDK provides line rate performance for guest VNFs.

SR-IOV networking provides enhanced performance characteristics, including improved throughput for specific networks and virtual machines.

Other important features for performance tuning include huge pages, NUMA alignment, host isolation and CPU pinning. VNF flavors require huge pages for better performance. Host isolation and CPU pinning improve NFV performance and prevent spurious packet loss.

See NFV Performance Considerations for a high-level introduction to CPUs and NUMA topology.