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Introduction
This document contains instructions for installing and configuring 6WIND Virtual Accelerator plugin for Fuel.
Key terms, acronyms and abbreviations
| 6WIND Virtual Accelerator | |
| VA | 6WIND Virtual Accelerator |
| MOS | Mirantis Openstack |
Overview
Virtual Accelerator is a product of the 6WIND speed series that provides packet processing acceleration for virtual network infrastructures.
Virtual Accelerator 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), Virtual Accelerator supports an extensive set of networking protocols to provide a complete virtual networking infrastructure.
Virtual Accelerator 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.
Virtual Accelerator is available for Intel x86-based servers and supports major Linux distributions.
Virtual Accelerator 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
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
High performance virtual switching
- OVS acceleration
- Linux Bridge
High performance virtual networking
In addition to virtual switching, Virtual Accelerator supports a complete set of networking protocols, based on the 6WIND Gate technology, that can be used to design innovative virtual networking infrastructures.
- Virtual Accelerator baseline
- Forwarding (ipv4 and ipv6)
- vxlan
- vlan
- gre
- Linux bridge filtering
- Virtual Accelerator L3
- vrf
- Filtering (ipv4 and ipv6)
- nat
- Tunneling (IPinIP)
- Virtual Accelerator ipsec
- Intel Multi-Buffer and QuickAssist crypto
- ipsec (ipv4 and ipv6)
- ike (v1 and v2)
Support of standard Virtio drivers
Virtual Accelerator 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).
Seamless integration with management and orchestration tools
Virtual Accelerator 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.
Virtual Accelerator is also validated with the Mirantis Openstack cloud operating system:
- Supports Mirantis Openstack 8.0
Supported platforms
Virtual Accelerator is provided as a set of binary packages and is validated on the following distributions:
- ubuntu-14.04
- redhat-7
- centos-7
Refer to the Virtual Accelerator Release Notes for detailed information about the latest validated versions of the Linux distributions.
Licensing information
| 6WIND Virtual Accelerator | Commercial |