Crossbow: From Hardware Virtualized NICs to Virtualized Networks

This paper describes a new architecture for achieving net-work virtualization using Virtual NICs (VNICs) as the building blocks. The VNICs can be associated with dedicated and independent hardware lanes that consist of dedicated NIC and kernel resources. Hardware lanes support dynamic polling, which enables the fair sharing of bandwidth with no performance penalty. VNICs ensure full separation of traffic for virtual machines within the host. A collection of VNICs on one or more physical machines can be connected to create a Virtual Wire by assigning them a common attribute such as a VLAN tag.