Service Function Chaining (SFC) is one of top 5 NFV use case. Supporting SFC in provider and enterprise networks requires performance assurance. Specifically, the Classifier and the Service Function Forwarder which are typically implemented in software such as virtual switches need to match line rate requirement. DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is an open source project comprising a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing. In this presentation, we will discuss our experiences accelerating SFC with DPDK. In addition, Telco and Datacenter carriers demands dynamic SFC that requires new SFC wire protocols (e.g. VxLAN-GPE and NSH) support in both data and control planes. We intend to share our experiences and future works of a high performance, NSH-aware SFC vertical solution with open-source ingredients: Openstack, Opendaylight, OpenvSwitch with DPDK acceleration.

1. Accelerate Service Function
Chaining Vertical Solution
with DPDK
Danny Zhou (danny.zhou@intel.com)
SDN/NFV Software Architect
Network Platform Group, Intel Cooperation

2. Agenda
• Overview: DPDK and Open vSwitch (OVS) with DPDK
• NSH-based SFC Vertical Solution with DPDK Accelration
• Performance evaluation of DPDK Accelerated SFC Data Plane
– Classifier
– SFF
– NSH-aware, DPDK Accelerated VNFs
– NSH Proxy
• Future Plan
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Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK)
• Libraries for network application development on multiple
architectures
• Speeds up networking functions
• Enables user space application development
• Facilitates both run-to-completion and pipeline models
• Purpose-built and Virtualized models
• Free, Open-sourced, Community driven, BSD Licensed
• Git: http://dpdk.org/git/dpdk
• About two dozen pre-built example applications
• Latest OS Support
 Fedora release 20/21 Ubuntu* 12.04 LTS
 Red Hat* Enterprise Linux 7.x Wind River* Linux* 5
 SUSE Enterprise Linux* 11 SP2FreeBSD* 10.x
DPDK Sample Applications
Linux Kernel
User Space
KNI IGB_UIO
Customer Applications
ISV Eco-System
Applications
EAL
MALLOC
MBUF
MEMPOOL
RING
TIMER
Core
Libraries
KNI
POWER
IVSHMEM
Platform
LPM
EXACT
MATCH
ACL
Classify
E1000
IXGBE
VMXNET3
IGB
I40e
VIRTIO
Packet Access
(PMD – Native & Virtual)
ETHDEV
XENVIRT
PCAP
RING
Packet
FrmWork
DISTRIB
Extensions
3rd Party
NIC
METER
SCHED
QoS

4. DPDK Support in Open vSwitch
• OVS with DPDK-Netdev available in OVS 2.4
• Uses ‘netdev’ datapath
• Adds additional interface types:
– ‘dpdk’ – physical port
– ‘dpdkr’ – DPDK ring device
– ‘dpdkvhostuser’ – vhost-user with DPDK 2.0
• Columns added to Open_vSwitch table
– ‘datapath_types’
– ‘iface_types’
User Space
ovs-vswitchd
VM 1
ovsdb-
server VM 2
DPDK Forwarding Plane
Kernel
PMD PMD
dpdk
vhost
user
dpdk
vhost
user
br-int
br-eth0 br-eth1
vxlan

5. 5
NSH-aware OpenvSwitch
(act as classifier and SFF)
OVSDB-server
NSH-aware
Forwarding Plane
DPDK
PMD
DPDK
PMD
VxLAN-GPE-NSH VTEP
fwd-
table
vSwitchd
(NXM for NSH fields)
SFC Orchestrator + VNF Manager (Tacker) + VIM
(Openstack)
Orchestration
Layer
Controller
Layer
Node
Layer
Opendaylight SB Interfaces & Protocol Plugins
Service Function Chaining
Opendaylight NB APIs (REST)
NSH-aware VNF
DPDK
NSH-aware VNF
DPDK
NSH-aware VNFs
DPDK
OVSDB PluginNetconf
Openflow Plugin
(NSP/NSI as match/action
fields)
NSH Proxy
Legacy VNFs
Service Graph
Datastore
DPDK
NSH-Based SFC Vertical Solution with DPDK Acceleration
Installation
by Fuel with
relevant
plugins

6. OVS Based Classifier Performance Improvement
OpenvSwitch on Host1
PacketGen
(generates thousands of regular flows)
VxLAN-GPE-NSH
vport
encap
decap
Tunnelport0
OpenvSwitch on Host2
VxLAN-GPE-NSH
vport
decap
port1 port0 port1
1
2
3

7. OVS Based SFF Performance With DPDK
DUT
PacketGen
(generates thousands of VxLAN-GPE-NSH flows)
OpenvSwitch
VNF
DPDK PMD
port0 port1
• NSH-aware L2Fwd running in a VM as simple VNF
• Measure Phy-VM-Phy performance of NSH-aware
OVS with DPDK
• Preliminary data shows roughly 70% line rate of
40G traffics for big packet (>1K packet size), with 5
IvyBridge cores
• Optimization ongoing, target 40Gb line rate for
256B packets with 2 Haswell cores

8. Performance of DPDK Accelerated NSH-aware Sample
VNFs
DUT
PacketGen
(generates thousands of VxLAN-GPE-NSH flows)
NSH-aware NAT
DPDK PMD
port0 port1
• DPPD (Data Plane Performance Demonstrator) are user
space applications based on DPDK
• Includes a NSH decap/encap layer supporting VxLAN-GPE
and Ethernet transports
• Sample NSH-aware VNFs “FW and NAT” build on top of
easy-to-use DPPD’ packet processing framework
• 10G line rate with single core, despite of packet size
Static NAT
(inner L3 hdr
only)
NSH
encap
Ingress Egress
NSH
encap

9. Performance of DPDK Based NSH Proxy
DPDK NSH Proxy
PacketGen
(generates thousands of VxLAN-GPE-NSH flows)
decap
Legacy VNF
1
Strip VxLAN-
GPE-NSH header
Tag original frame
with VxLAN header 10G line rate
Process packet
Remove original
frame
Add previously
stripped VxLAN-
GPE-NSH header
• Loopback VxLAN-GPE-NSH traffics to measured
performance of NSH Proxy
 Performs two encapsulation and two de-
capsulation operations.
 Tx: 10G line rate VxLAN-GPE-NSH traffics with
142B packet
 Rx: 58% line rate for single core
• 10G line rate can be achieves within 2 cores
Tx
Rx
0
2
4
6
8
10
NSH Proxy Performance

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Future Plan
• SFC vertical solution for OPNFV “B” release
– Fuel based installer: Tacker & Openstack, ODL, NSH-aware OVS, qemu,
DPPK and NSH-aware VNFs
• Continues performance optimization in OVS
– NSH MD Type 2 and OAM (e.g. Traceroute, timestamping) support
– Tunneling transport encap/decap performance optimization on new Intel
processors
– NSH acceleration with smart NICs
• SFC new features
– Direct SFC classifier control
– IP-Less VNFs
– Flow programmer for resolving multi-writer issue
– Symmetry flow support with TCP proxy
– All-in-one SFC environment
– Network-aware network placement algorithms and scheduler
– Advanced service function and service path selection algorithms
– NSH Proxy support