OpenNetVM

Network middleboxes are growing in number and diversity. Middleboxes have been deployed widely to complement the basic end-to-end functionality provided by the Internet Protocol suite that depends only on the minimal functionality of a best-effort network layer. The move from purpose-built hardware middleboxes to software appliances running in virtual machines provides much needed deployment flexibility, but significant challenges remain. Just as Software Defined Networking (SDN) research and product development was greatly accelerated with the release of several open source SDN platforms, we believe that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) research can see similar growth with the development of a flexible platform that enables high performance NFV prototypes. Towards this end we have been building OpenNetVM, an efficient packet processing framework that greatly simplifies the development of network functions, as well as research into their management and optimization. OpenNetVM runs network functions in lightweight Docker containers, enabling fast startup and reducing memory overheads. The OpenNetVM platform manager provides load balancing, flexible flow management, and service name abstractions. OpenNetVM efficiently routes packets through dynamically created service chains, achieving throughputs of 10 Gbps even when traversing a chain of 6 NFs. In this paper we describe our architecture and evaluate its performance compared to existing NFV platforms.