Data plane acceleration for virtual switching in data centers: NP-based approach

With the emerging trend of server virtualization, a new network access layer has emerged that is composed of the virtual switches running on the server platform, providing connectivity among the virtual machines (VMs) that live on the same physical server. This layer is generally implemented using the Open vSwitch (OVS) or an equivalent proprietary virtual switch. In networking for virtualization, virtual switch provides a simple solution for VM-to-VM connectivity, but this function of virtual switching must provide sustained, aggregated high-bandwidth network traffic. Majority of virtual switches implementation do not deliver adequate performance. To address this problem, we propose a strategy that aims to improve virtual switches performance by extending the packet processing tasks to hardware accelerators such as network processors. The proposed strategy is based on an adaptive and dynamic allocation of processors resources. The allocation mechanism consists on mapping the virtual switch tasks to the adequate set of resources, i.e. multi-core datapath or hardware accelerator datapath. Thus, the proposed solution tends to enhance throughput and scales down latency in order to accelerate network traffic switching over virtual switches.