Open vSwitch (OvS) is a Linux Foundation collaborative project. By using the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) as a netdev, it provides a high performance virtual switch solution suitable for enterprise and telco deployments. Early observation shows the aggregated throughput drops with the increasing of virtual machine (VM) instances under heavy traffic. In order to support many-instance high bandwidth scenarios, investigation and optimization are done to address this issue.
This session introduces the latest findings on boosting OvS scalability by optimizing cache performance and CPU utilization. Experiment using OvS-DPDK as reference infrastructure proves that the optimization applied can provide 3x the throughput compared with the baseline while handling 30 guests and no significant performance degradation as VM number increases. This analysis can be applied to any virtual switch.
