Abstract
The shared nature of multi-tenant cloud networks requires providing
tenant isolation and quality of service, which in turn requires
enforcing thousands of network-level rules, policies, and traffic
rate limits. Enforcing these rules in virtual machine hypervisors
imposes significant computational overhead, as well as increased
latency. In FasTrak, we seek to exploit temporal locality in flows
and flow sizes to offload a subset of network virtualization functionality
from the hypervisor into switch hardware freeing up the
hypervisor. FasTrak manages the required hardware and hypervisor
rules as a unified set, moving rules back and forth to minimize
the overhead of network virtualization, and focusing on flows (or
flow aggregates) that are either most latency sensitive or exhibit the
highest packets-per-second rates.