6wind-virtual-accelerator-plugin: adding overview section to doc

This commit adds an overview of 6WIND virtual accelerator in the
Introduction section of plugin documentation.

Change-Id: I74b6c440cbf92acfd610902919634d1497271a61
Signed-off-by: Francesco Santoro <francesco.santoro@6wind.com>

doc/source/introduction.rst

@@ -19,6 +19,111 @@ Key terms, acronyms and abbreviations
 Overview
 --------
 
+.. |va| replace:: Virtual Accelerator
+.. |6w| replace:: 6WIND
+.. |6Wg| replace:: 6WIND Gate
+
+|va| is a product of the |6w| speed series that provides packet processing
+acceleration for virtual network infrastructures.
+
+|va| runs inside the hypervisor and removes the performance bottlenecks by
+offloading virtual switching from the networking stack. The cpu resources
+necessary for packet processing are drastically reduced, so that less cores are
+required to process network traffic at higher rates and Linux stability is
+increased.
+
+In addition to simple virtual switching (using OVS or the Linux bridge), |va|
+supports an extensive set of networking protocols to provide a complete virtual
+networking infrastructure.
+
+|va| is fully integrated with Linux and its environment, so that existing Linux
+applications do not need to be modified to benefit from packet processing
+acceleration.
+
+|va| is available for Intel x86-based servers and supports major Linux
+distributions.
+
+|va| is provided in three flavors according to the required feature set:
+
+- baseline: simple virtual switching and ip forwarding
+- L3: baseline + advanced L3 features such as vrf, filtering and nat
+- ipsec: L3 + ipsec features
+
+Features
+--------
+
+.. rubric:: High performance I/Os leveraging dpdk, with multi-vendor nic support
+            from Intel, Mellanox and Emulex
+
+- Intel 10G/40G XL710
+- Intel 10G 82598, 82599, X540
+- Mellanox 10G/40G ConnectX®-3 EN and ConnectX®-3 Pro EN series
+- Mellanox 10G/25G/50G/100G ConnectX®-4 EN and ConnectX®-4 Lx EN series
+- Emulex 10G/40G OneConnect® OCe14000 family
+- Intel 1G 82575, 82576, 82580, I210, I211, I350, I354
+
+.. rubric:: High performance virtual switching
+
+- OVS acceleration
+- Linux Bridge
+
+.. rubric:: High performance virtual networking
+
+In addition to virtual switching, |va| supports a complete set of networking
+protocols, based on the |6wg| technology, that can be used to design
+innovative virtual networking infrastructures.
+
+- |va| baseline
+
+  - Forwarding (ipv4 and ipv6)
+  - vxlan
+  - vlan
+  - gre
+  - Linux bridge filtering
+
+- |va| L3
+
+  - vrf
+  - Filtering (ipv4 and ipv6)
+  - nat
+  - Tunneling (IPinIP)
+
+- |va| ipsec
+
+  - Intel Multi-Buffer and QuickAssist crypto
+  - ipsec (ipv4 and ipv6)
+  - ike (v1 and v2)
+
+.. rubric:: Support of standard Virtio drivers
+
+|va| comes with a high performance Virtio back-end driver for communication
+with any guest running Virtio front-end drivers (can be based on dpdk, Linux,
+or other OSes).
+
+.. rubric:: Seamless integration with management and orchestration tools
+
+|va| is fully integrated with Linux and its environment, so that existing Linux
+applications do not need to be modified to benefit from packet processing
+acceleration. Standard Linux APIs are preserved, including iproute2, iptables,
+brctl, ovs-ofctl, ovs-vsctl, etc.
+
+|va| is also validated with the Mirantis Openstack cloud operating system:
+
+- Supports Mirantis Openstack 7.0
+
+Supported platforms
+-------------------
+
+|va| is provided as a set of binary packages and is validated on the following
+distributions:
+
+- ubuntu-14.04
+- redhat-7
+- centos-7
+
+.. seealso:: Refer to the |va| Release Notes for detailed information about the
+             latest validated versions of the Linux distributions.
+
 
 Licensing information
 ---------------------