Turning an open source project into a carrier grade vswitch for NFV: Vosyswitch challenges & results

Abstract

NFV is more and more leveraging open source as a suitable direction to mitigate traditional vendor lock-in effects. The operators interest and strong involvement in open source communities like OPNFV, OpenStack, OVS and DPDK are in fact continuously growing. However, real deployments are still lacking open source solutions. In this paper, the challenges that NFV open source projects are facing to be deployed in operator production environments are identified. Furthermore, the Virtual Open Systems experience in building VOSYSwitch, a user space virtual switch product based on an open source networking framework (Snabb) is presented together with a set of benchmarks which showcase its carrier grade performance level. In fact, the performance results show that VOSYSwitch outperforms OVS-DPDK, a virtual switch solution used in many real deployment environments, which is also the basis of other virtual switch solutions, such as CuckooSwitch, Ensemble Connector, and VPP (DPDK).