The physical compute infrastructure that you set up must support a large compute capacity for data plane intensive CNFs. The host BIOS must also have a high-performance CPU configuration to drive maximum performance per CPU core.
When you set up a high performing physical compute infrastructure, consider the following best practices:
Choice of CPU: Use CPUs with more cores and high CPU speeds to achieve improved overall performance. Use CPUs with large L3 cache size. L3 cache is shared among all the cores of a CPU.
NUMA Node Interleaving: Ensure that this setting is not enabled in the BIOS of a multi CPU socket server. When enabled, the hypervisor sees the available memory from multiple sockets of a host as one contiguous area, and may store the memory pages in the remote socket memory.
Hyperthreading: Enable Hyperthreading for CPU in the BIOS. Hyperthreading allows a single physical CPU core to execute two independent logical threads simultaneously, and hence increases the number of CPU cores available to the CaaS layer. The logical threads of a physical core share resources such as memory caches and execution units. BIOS providers might refer to the logical threads as Logical Processors. For more details, see VMware Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 8.0.
High Performance Profile: Set the Performance profile in BIOS to High or Maximum Performance. Some vendors also implement customized Telco Profiles for operators to use. This setting ensures that the CPU does not throttle down to preserve power. Hence, the CPU cycles are always available to workloads.
C-States and P-States: Deactivate these CPU states manually in BIOS, if the High Performance Profile is not available in BIOS or the CPU states are not turned off automatically. These power-saving CPU features can impact performance.
Turbo Boost: Enable Turbo Boost in BIOS to operate the CPU faster than the rated frequency for peak loads. For more information about Turbo Boost, see the Frequently Asked Questions on the Intel Turbo Boost Technology page.
Some BIOS implementations may not allow control or modification of these settings. For information about specific BIOS implementation, see the corresponding BIOS documentation.
