VNF-C vNIC Scaling

You can scale up the data plane performance of a VNF-C by increasing the number of vNICs used by the VM. Note the following design considerations:

• Increase the number of vNICs as opposed to trying to match the speed of the physical NIC with a virtual NIC. Spreading high traffic load across several vNICs allows the VNF-C to gain more efficiency from the CPU cores available on the host.

• When scaling a VNF-C, maintain a balance between the number of vNICs and CPU cores used by the VNF-C and the resources required to fully use the physical NIC.

Summary of Recommendations:

• To scale the data plane performance of a VNF-C, increase the number of vNICs and add two logical cores to N-VDS (E) per vNIC.

To summarize this section, the relevant performance tuning that must be considered for a data plane intensive workload are:

• Using the latest VMXNET3 paravirtualized vNICs driver

• Using the latest virtual machine hardware version

• Dedicating CPU cores to the data plane intensive VNF-C

• Configuring sched.cpu.latencySensitivity = High in the data plane VNF-C

• Using Huge Pages

• vNIC scaling in Data plane intensive VNF-C