Packet Pushers - Priority Queue

On this Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we interview Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks, to gain an alternate view on OpenFlow TTPs (table type patterns). We first talked about TTPs in Weekly 220 in a discussion with Curt Beckmann back in January 2015. While Curt was fairly enthused that TTPs were going to move the ball forward, Rob is not convinced that TTPs are the long-term answer to make it easier for OpenFlow controllers and switches to share capabilities.

Purpose-built hardware appliances for routing, load balancing, firewalling and other network services are giving way to virtual instances designed to run on x86-based servers. This trend is broadly defined as network functions virtualization (NFV).

It’s part of the shift toward ‘software-defined’ environments where an orchestration system invokes a series of network functions to deliver a set of services to a consumer.

The trend is taking hold in part because x86-based machines are cheaper and easier to scale than specialized hardware appliances.

However, a challenge with hypervisor networking is performance. How do you get the throughput you need out of an x86 server when the tastiest hardware bits of the CPU core and NICs are abstracted away?

Today on Packet Pushers Priority Queue, we’re going to discuss the hypervisor performance bottleneck, some of the workarounds that exist today, and the commercial-grade virtual acceleration for hypervisor networking with our sponsor, 6WIND. Yann Rapaport, product manager at 6WIND, joins us for the discussion.

We’ll talk about the reasons why virtual switches struggle to fill physical pipes, walk through the packet flow through a hypervisor, and talk about packet processing in Linux. We’ll look at some of the efforts to address performance issues, including SR-IOV, and OVS with DPDK.

We also drill into 6WIND’s technology, including Virtual Accelerator, Turbo Router, and Turbo IPSec.

For more information about 6WIND, see the Packet Pushers blog 6WIND Offering Accelerated L3 Virtual Appliances.

Links:

Hardware Versus Software Switching – 6WIND Whitepaper

6WIND Turbo Router + 6WIND Virtual Accelerator vs. Linux Routing + Open vSwitch – 6WIND Video

6WIND Turbo IPsec + 6WIND Virtual Accelerator vs. Linux IPsec + Open vSwitch – 6WIND Video

Blazing performance with 6WIND Speed Series Turbo Appliances – SDX Central

6WIND Offering Accelerated L3 Virtual Appliances – Packet Pushers

In this podcast, Packet Pushers co-host Ethan Banks gets a bit into the weeds with University of Maryland's Dave Levin in this detailed discussion of Alibi Routing, a privacy-driven research project to prove that traffic flowing between a particular source and destination did not traverse a specific geographic region.

[player] This sponsored podcast is a continuation of our series recorded at HP Discover Barcelona 2014. Our thanks to Chris Young for organizing the topics and guests. The interesting conversations in Barcelona at HP Discover 2014 continued with a chat about the shifty meaning of “open.” In the world of technology, being open means a lot of... Read more »

[player] Cisco contributes quite a bit of code to the open source world, and Michael Enescu, CTO for Open Source Initiatives, is just the guy to tell the Packet Pushers audience about it. In this discussion with hosts Ethan Banks and Greg Ferro, Michael discusses the what, why and how of Cisco’s open source efforts. What... Read more »