The Enhanced mode of the N-VDS switch uses DPDK and vertical NUMA alignment to accelerate workloads.

Hosts Preparation for Data Plane Intensive Workloads

Before data plane intensive workload can attach to an N-VDS Enhanced switch, the hosts in the Resource Pod need specific configuration.

  • vNICs that are intended for use with the N-VDS Enhanced switch should be connected by using similar bandwidth capacity on all NUMA nodes.

  • An N-VDS Enhanced switch with at least one dedicated physical NIC should be created on each host.

  • The same number of cores from each NUMA node should be assigned to the N-VDS Enhanced switch.

  • A Poll Mode Driver for the N-VDS Enhanced switch must be installed on the ESXi hosts for use of the physical NICs that are dedicated to the N-VDS Enhanced switch. You can download the driver from the VMware Compatibility Guide. Identify the correct drivers by looking for N-VDS Enhanced Data Path in the feature column of the VMware Compatibility Guide.

The host where the N-VDS Enhanced switch resides should be configured similarly to the topology depicted in the figure that follows. To ensure optimal performance, vertical alignment is established between the VNF-C, N-VDS Enhanced, and the CPU assigned to the NIC on the same NUMA node. The CPU scheduler ensures that the VNF-C's vCPU maps to physical CPU cores on the same NUMA node where the N-VDS Enhanced physical cores are mapped.

Figure 1. N-VDS Enhanced Switch Configuration

Workload Dual-Mode Connectivity

N-VDS Enhanced supports VLAN encapsulation and N-VDS Standard supports the overlay Geneve encapsulated traffic. If both the VLAN and overlay traffic connectivities are required, both the N-VDS Enhanced and N-VDS Standard switches can be deployed on the same host with dedicated physical NICs to each switch. VNFs can have a VIF connected to the N-VDS Enhanced switch and another VIF connected to the N-VDS Standard switch for East-West connectivity.

Port groups are configured on both N-VDS Standard and N-VDS Enhanced switches enabling East-West communications between a data plane VNF-C and a control plane VNF-C.

Figure 2. N-VDS Dual-Mode Configuration