Fast path acceleration for open vSwitch in overlay networks

Abstract

Through virtualization technology, new perspective has been opened in computing. Recent software defined data centers(SDDC) are relaying on this technology to provide their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) by running multiple virtual machines over shared resources. In order to ensure communications between different tenants, and to support virtualization in networking level, SDDCs are relaying on overlay networks that provide to tenants a new logical view of the physical topology. Overlay networks are managed in the edge such as top of rack switch or simply by a software added in hypervisor layer as Open virtual switch. However, using a fully software implementation led to server overhead and decrease Virtual machines performances. In this paper, we introduce a new strategy that enables network virtualization edge to offload elephant flow to a fast path created in hardware level. The first aim is how to detect elephant flow. The second aim is how to define new fast data path in hardware level. This fast data path reduces the latency and accelerates the forwarding in the fabric.