VNF Component vNIC Scaling

The data plane performance of a VNF-C can scale up by configuring more vNICs to the VM. When using high throughput physical NICs on the host, it is better to increase the number of vNICs as opposed to trying to match the speed of the physical NIC with a vNIC. Spreading high traffic load across several vNICs allows the VNF-C to gain more benefit from the CPU cores available on the host.

When scaling a VNF-C, you must find balance between the number of vNICs and CPU cores used by the VNF-C and the resources needed to fully utilize the physical NIC. As a best practice, consider scaling a VNF horizontally once a certain number of vCPUs have been consumed by the VNF-C.

Recommendations

• To scale the data plane performance of a VNF-C, increase the number of vNICs.
• Once the number of vNICs is larger than the number of logical cores used by N-VDS Enhanced, consider scaling horizontally.