Enable NFV features¶

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a powerful technology that leverages virtualization of particular network functions which allows a better flexibility in network administration and enables you to use network hardware more efficiently.

MCP supports the following NFV features:

• Data Plane Development Kit or DPDK is a set of libraries and drivers to perform fast packet processing in the user space that OVS/vRouter can use to move network packets processing from a kernel to a user space. OVS/vRouter with DPDK acceleration on compute nodes reduces the processing time of network packets transferred between a host’s network interface and a guest bypassing the host’s kernel. Moreover, DPDK leverages benefits of usage of other technologies such as Huge Pages, CPU pinning, and NUMA topology scheduling.
• SR-IOV is an extension to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification that enables a network adapter to separate access to its resources among various PCIe hardware functions: Physical Function (PF) and Virtual Functions (VFs). As a result, you can achieve near bare-metal performance, since network devices can forward traffic directly to a VF bypassing the host.
• Multiqueue for DPDK-based vrouters enables the scaling of packet sending/receiving processing to the number of available vCPUs of a guest by using multiple queues.

The following table shows compatibility matrix for MCP of NFV features for different deployments.