With PoC FDP-1286 we evaluate userspace datapaths with OVS-DPDK for OpenShift's default CNI plugin OVN-Kubernetes, OpenShift's default CNI plugin. In the previous PoC FDP-1285 we moved container networking to userspace by replacing veth devices with VDUSE devices. Now, we moved networking of KubeVirt virtual machines to userspace with help of the vhost-vdpa protocol (FDP-1615 and its dependencies). This ultimately moved the entire OpenShift networking stack to userspace.

Next, we aim to evaluate the performance and latency of our userspace networking stack via OVN-Kubernetes. Franck Baudin requested results for VM-to-VM traffic across bare-metal nodes: We will deploy a multi-node OpenShift (MNO) cluster on bare-metal servers, launch two VMs on separate nodes, and run benchmarks between them.

Benchmarks on our bare-metal cluster (FDP-1546) are suboptimal due to nodes being connected with 1GBit/s only. Benchmarks on QE's bare-metal cluster (FDP-1618) are blocked due to Geneve tunnel offload issues on Mellanox NICs (FDP-1897). As a workaround, we will deploy and benchmark our PoC on Telco bare-metal nodes.

To achieve this, we will create Kubernetes manifests (and Ansible inventories) for jmeng/ovs-ci-with-ocp to deploy PoC FDP-1286 on Telco bare-metal servers.

Benchmarking VM-to-VM traffic on Telco bare-metal nodes is tracked separately in FDP-2103, on our bare-metal nodes in FDP-1546, and on QE's bare-metal nodes in FDP-1618.