Chapter 12. NFV performance

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

You can enable high performance packet switching between physical NICs and virtual machines using data plane development kit (DPDK) accelerated virtual machines. OVS 2.10 embeds support for DPDK 17 and includes support for vhost-user multiqueue, allowing scalable performance. OVS-DPDK provides line rate performance for guest VNFs.

Single root I/O virtualization (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 and emulator thread isolation for better performance. Host isolation and CPU pinning improve NFV performance and prevent spurious packet loss.

For a high-level introduction to CPUs and NUMA topology, see: NFV Performance Considerations and Configure Emulator Threads to run on a Dedicated Physical CPU.