The Emulex OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet (10GbE and 40GbE) Network Adapters and Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) are the first of their kind to be designed and optimized for Virtual Network Fabrics (VNFs). Key to this claim is Emulex Virtual Network ExcelerationTM (VNeX) technology which, among other things, restores the hardware offloads that are normally lost because of the encapsulation that takes place with VNFs. For a VMware environment that is utilizing a Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) VirtualWire interface, most Network Interface Cards (NICs) will see a significant reduction in throughput performance due to losing the NIC hardware offloads, and a loss of hypervisor CPU efficiency, due to it having to now perform much of the computation that the NIC otherwise would have done. The OneConnect OCe14000 adapters by default use VNeX to restore the offload processing in the hardware, thus providing non-virtual network levels of throughput and hypervisor CPU efficiency in VNF environments.
To prove this point, we setup a VXLAN working model using two VMware ESXi5.5 host hypervisors and configured a VXLAN network connection between them. Each server hosted eight RHEL6.3 guest virtual machines (VMs) with network access between the hypervisors using the VMware VirtualWire interface. As a network load generator, we used IXIA IxChariot to perform a network performance tests between the VMs. We compared two test cases, one with the hardware offloads enabled on the OCe14000 (this is the default behavior) and another to a NIC that does not utilize hardware offloads for VXLAN.
You can see in chart 1 that the bi-directional throughput with hardware offloads is as much as 70 percent greater when compare to a NIC without the hardware offloads.
In chart 2, you can see the impact that hardware offloads have on hypervisor CPU utilization, the OCe14000 adapter with VNeX that can process the offloads in hardware reduces CPU utilization as much as half when compared to standard NICs when used for VMware VirtualWire connections, increasing the number of VMs supported per server.