06.177.2015 - Tuning ESXi for NFV Workloads

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) enables the efficiency and agilitybenefits that come from untethering network functions from proprietaryappliances and moving them to a virtualized infrastructure running overhypervisors and COTS hardware. Enterprise IT departments have beenrealizing such benefits for a number of years but the telecommunicationsenvironment brings new workloads with different requirements. The vSphere ESXi hypervisor provides a high-performance and competitiveplatform that effectively runs many Tier 1 application workloads invirtual machines. By default, ESXi has been heavily tuned for driving highI/O throughput efficiently by utilizing fewer CPU cycles and conservingpower, as required by a wide range of workloads. Telco and NFV application workloads are different from the typical Tier Ienterprise application workloads in that they tend to be any combinationof latency sensitive, jitter sensitive, high packet rate or highbandwidth. vSphere ESXi can be tuned specifically for such workloads to achieve best performancein the NFV use case. I recently published a white paper with many useful tips fortuning the ESXi hypervisor, the hardware infrastructure as well as NFVapplications to achieve good performance on ESXi. You can learn more about NFV at http://www.vmware.com/go/nfv . More Telco-related blogs can be found at http://blogs.vmware.com/telco . - View Press Release - Visit VMware, Inc.