Virtual switches are an important element in solutions for Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and the performance of virtual switches will have a significant impact on the success of these solutions. Open vSwitch (OVS) is an open source virtual switch implementation supported by many industry leaders developing solutions for SDN and NFV. The throughput achieved using OVS on standard server hardware is therefore of critical interest to service providers and carriers planning to use SDN and NFV, and anyone developing virtualized solutions for the data center and communications infrastructure.
In this blog I am going to review the demonstration shown by 6WIND at the recent Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California and NFV and SDN Summit in Paris showing OVS acceleration reaching 195 Gbps. The demonstration used server hardware from Hewlett-Packard, an Associate member of the Intel® Intelligent Systems Alliance, Open vSwitch acceleration software from 6WIND, an Affiliate member of the Alliance and Linux operating system from Red Hat, a General member of the Alliance. The 250-plus members of the Alliance collaborate closely with Intel to create hardware, software, tools, and services to help speed embedded systems to market.