Goal

Link redundancy and aggregation for high-performance DPDK guests

Background

Provide support for host-based/OVS-based DPDK for virtual machines running on-top of OpenShift Virtualisation, allowing them to utilise the performance/latency benefits of DPDK without having to rely on the current SRIOV-only solution. The main driver behind this is to allow "telco-like" features to be exposed for virtual machines, and whilst the SRIOV-based solution we have for DPDK today (currently tech preview with 4.8) provides a lot of throughput potential, it doesn't address all of the expectations that customers have, especially if they've come from an OpenStack world. One of the key expectation is for failover/link-redundancy - with OpenStack one can expose a VIF to a virtual machine that has OVS-DPDK acceleration available via the host, and runs on-top of an LACP bond at the host level, meaning the VM running on-top never needs to care about link availability, it only sees a single VIF that has both DPDK support and the benefits of both link redundancy and link aggregation supplied by the host... so both failover and aggregated throughput. With the SRIOV-only approach that we have today, they have to manage the link redundancy themselves from within the guest, e.g. a bond of two VF's, and can only do active/backup bonding (no link aggregation, only the performance of a single VF) due to the upstream switch not being able to provide LACP support for the VF's.

User Stories

• As an administrator, I want to offer up DPDK-capable network interfaces for my developers and application owners that provides high throughput and link redundancy out of the box.
• As a developer/application-owner, I want to deploy my applications into an environment that doesn't rely on me having to manage the link availability from within the guest.
• As an infrastructure owner looking to move to OpenShift from OpenStack, I need to make sure that we don't see a regression between what we have today with OVS-DPDK and what is being offered with OpenShift.

Non-Requirements

• tbd

Notes

• tbd

Owners

Done Checklist