OVN Hardware offload

Speakers: Ariel Levkovich (NVIDIA Corporation), Marcelo Leitner (Red Hat, Inc.)

Cloud native, and modern data center applications such as AI, demand high speed networking. 25Gbs and 100Gbs are the standard today with 200Gbs and 400Gbbs coming soon. Such network speeds make the use of SDN very challenging, mostly due to the heavy CPU investment needed for SDN enforcement. In this talk we will present the progress we made so far with accelerating OVN, OVN Kubernetes and OVN ML2 (OpenStack) via TC and NVIDIA ConnectX SmartNICs and BlueField DPUs, including the support for Conntrack hardware acceleration. We will also present the biggest challenges we have faced in such endeavor and the resulting improvements out of it until now. Some of these improvements helped not only with software datapath correctness but also with performance even when using other OVS datapaths, like OVS kernel datapath. We will also show performance numbers for the main use cases and future plan.