Configure SR-IOV and DPDK¶

Before completing the steps described in this section, verify that your environment meets the requirements in Prerequisites and limitations.

To use NFV features, you must configure corresponding settings before you deploy an OpenStack environment. The values for DPDK, Huge Pages, SR-IOV, and CPU pinning differ for each workload.

When calculating resource for DPDK, consider that one DPDK core can process 3 Mpps of network traffic. For example, if you have 2 x 10 GB network interfaces in bond, you have throughput of 24 Mpps. Therefore, you need to assign 8 DPDK cores (8 x 3).

All NFV features can be enabled on the same compute node or on separate compute nodes and do not depend on each other. However, the procedure and requirements are similar.

For the purpose of example, the following configuration is used:

To configure DPDK and SRIOV:

1. Log in to the Fuel web UI.

2. Click New OpenStack Environment.

3. Follow the prompts of the wizard to create a new OpenStack environment.

4. In the Compute screen, select QEMU-KVM.

5. In the Networking Setup screen, select Neutron with VLAN segmentation or Neutron with tunneling segmentation (VXLAN).

6. Complete the configuration wizard as required and click Create.

7. Select the environment you have just created.

8. Click Settings -> Compute.

9. Select KVM.

10. Click Save Settings.

11. Click Nodes -> Add Nodes.

12. Create controller and compute nodes.

    Select the hardware that supports NFV features for the nodes on which you want to enable SR-IOV.

13. Click the node settings icon.

14. Enable Huge Pages and CPU pinning:

    • For SR-IOV:
      1. Click Node Attributes.
      2. Type the Nova CPU pinning and Nova Huge Pages parameters.
      3. Click Save Settings.
    • For DPDK:
      1. Click Node Attributes.
      2. Type the Nova CPU pinning and Nova Huge Pages parameters.
      3. Type the DPDK CPU pinning and DPDK Huge Pages parameters.
      4. Click Save Settings.
    • For Huge Pages:
      1. Click Node Attributes.
      2. Type the required Huge pages value.
    • For CPU pinning:
      1. Click Node Attributes.
      2. Type the required CPU pinning value.

15. Proceed to:

    • For SR-IOV, see: Configure SR-IOV network interface.
    • For DPDK, see: Configure DPDK network interface.