Considerations for Using DPDK in a Hypervisor Virtual Environment

In recent years, with the advent of SDKs such as DPDK and XDP, SDN/NFV system managers have many choices when it comes to data plane software. DPDK is often the top pick because it has the highest performance among such SDKs and is easy to use because the software runs in the user space. It is currently the preferred SDK for fast packet processing. In some cases, DPDK applications have been introduced into actual SDN/NFV environments, and many studies have reported the performance advantage of using DPDK appliances in physical environments. While these studies deal with communications that enter the physical interface, pass the NFV system, and go back to the physical interface, our work differs in that we examine communications that are closed in a virtual environment. Our results showed that DPDK appliances had a lower performance than non DPDK appliances in virtual environment.