Open vSwitch Vxlan performance acceleration in cloud computing data center
Yaohua Yan, Hongbo Wang · 2016
Cloud computing is one of the most popular Internet concepts, and many large companies provide cloud services to users. These large companies have built their own data centers to support upper layers of cloud services. To save cost and increase flexibility, SDN and virtualization technologies are widely used in data centers. Open vSwitch is an open source virtual switch that supports the OpenFlow protocol. Open vSwitch can provide a true network connection for all virtual machines running on a single physical server. However, the actual performance of Open vSwitch is not satisfactory. The most prominent issue for Open vSwitch is Vxlan, which is a very important tunneling protocol in the data center. In our test environment, Open vSwitch Vxlan throughput is only 2Gbps. This paper presents a new approach to design and implement Open vSwitch. We will use hardware acceleration method to improve the performance of Open vSwitch Vxlan. Our research results show that our design and implementation can improve performance up to 5 times, and the actual throughput closes to 12Gbps.