Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) delivers carrier grade, low latency, data plane performance. VMware technologies including CPU pinning, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) placement, HugePages support, and SR-IOV support allow VNFs to maintain high network performance.

If you have configured VMware Integrated OpenStack as your VIM, you can define certain EPA attributes for increasing the performance capabilities of your VNFs. You can provide attribute values that are higher than the default value.

Some of the attributes that you can define are:
  • Compute Performance Attributes:
    • CPU Pinning
    • NUMA Topology Awareness
    • Memory Page Size (HugePage)
  • Data Plane Performance Attributes:
    • SR-IOV
VMware Integrated OpenStack supports NUMA aware placement on the underlying vSphere platform. This feature provides low latency and high throughput to Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that run on telecommunications environments. To achieve low latency and high throughput, it is important that vCPUs, memory, and physical NICs that are used for VM traffic are aligned on the same NUMA node.

You can enable the EPA capabilities on a VDU using the Network Function Descriptor on VMware Telco Cloud Automation. For more information, see Design a Virtual Network Function Descriptor.