Performance Evaluation of 10GE NICs with SR-IOV Support: I/O Virtualization and Network Stack Optimizations

MMB&DFT 2012

Abstract

SR-IOV has been proposed to improve the performance and scalability of I/O in Virtual machines and some 10GE NICs supporting this functionality have already appeared on the market. In addition to the SR-IOV support, these NICs all provide optimizations for various network layers within the OS kernel. In this paper we try to present a comprehensive view of the performance gain by SR-IOV. This study is conducted by evaluating the performance of 10GE NICs with SR-IOV support at different layers in various virtualized environments.