DPU / SmartNIC Integration & Hardware Offloading

Private Cloud Director supports DPU / SmartNIC integration, to provide hardware acceleration by offloading network tasks to an attached NIC hardware, freeing up main server CPU.

Hardware offload support makes use of SR-IOV as an underlying mechanism to accelerate the data path between a virtual machine and the NIC hardware. The NIC can also supports hardware offloading of tunnel encapsulation and de-encapsulation.

Private Cloud Director leverages Open Virtual Network (OVN) behind the scenes, and in OVN, Layer 3 routing features are implemented as flow rules in Open vSwitch. This allows Layer 3 routing to also be offloaded to NICs with appropriate driver and firmware support.

This feature is not enabled by default. Contact your Private Cloud Director support liaison to enable this feature for your deployment.

Once enabled, you can create a virtual machine and attach it to a hardware offloaded port.

##Create a hardware offloaded port
pcdctl port create --network my-network --vnic-type direct \
    --binding-profile '{"capabilities": ["switchdev"]}' direct_port1
    
##Create a VM using this port 
pcdctl server create --flavor my-flavor --key-name my-key \
    --nic port-id=direct_port1 my-vm     

Validate that traffic is offloaded

Once hardware offloading is enabled for a VM, you can use the traffic control monitor command to observe updates to filters which is one of the mechanisms used to program the NIC switch hardware. Look for the ‘in_hw’ and ‘not_in_hw’ labels.

sudo tc monitor