Virtualized networking such as offered by OpenStack Networking (Neutron) enhances security and flexibility of clouds, and serves as a basis for novel applications such as Network Functions Virtualization. In some of these applications, as well as for "big data" in research and elsewhere, network performance is critical. We will look at performance in today's mainstream virtualization setups, identify bottlenecks, and suggest improvements.
CloudNetPerf has provisionally been granted experiment status on the awesome CloudLab infrastructure, for which we are very grateful.
New types of IT infrastructure allow for the dynamic provisioning of virtual networks to which tenants can connect compute resources such as virtual machines (VMs) or containers. They also provide network functions such as packet filtering, routers (often based on NAT), load balancers, VPNs, and so on. An interesting edge case is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), where the main purpose of the platform is the execution of various "virtualized network functions".