Title: NetVM: High Performance and Flexible Networking using Virtualization on Commodity Platforms

Abstract:

NetVM brings virtualization to the Network, by enabling high bandwidth network functions 
to operate at near line speed, while taking advantage of the flexibility and customization 
of low cost commodity servers. NetVM exploits Intel’s DPDK libraries to minimize the 
overhead of packet processing, and extends this framework and the KVM hypervisor to 
provide high throughput, low latency networking in virtualized environments. These 
techniques allow customizable processing capabilities such as firewalls, proxies, and 
routers to be embedded within the network, thus enabling the vision of software defined 
networking. NetVM runs network functions on commodity hardware using virtualization 
software, making it easy to dynamically scale, deploy, and reprogram services. This 
provides far greater flexibility than existing purpose-built, sometimes proprietary 
hardware. Complementing the control plane capabilities of SDNs, NetVM allows the system to 
perform the full range of packet processing required in network elements, including 
forwarding, implementing policies such as firewalls, and full packet inspection to 
determine subsequent processing. It does so with dramatically higher throughput than 
existing software router platforms. We have implemented NetVM on the KVM virtualization 
platform and detail many of the challenges we have solved such as adding support for high-
speed inter-VM communication through shared huge pages and enhancing the CPU scheduler to 
prevent overheads caused by inter-core communication and context switching. NetVM allows 
true zero-copy delivery of data to VMs both for packet processing and messaging among VMs 
within a trust boundary. Our evaluation shows how NetVM can compose complex network 
functionality from multiple pipelined VMs and still obtain throughputs up to 10 Gbps, an 
improvement of more than 250% compared to existing techniques that use SR-IOV for 
virtualized networking.