VALE, a Switched Ethernet for Virtual Machines

The growing popularity of virtual machines is pushing the demand for high performance communication between them. Past solutions have seen the use of hardware assistance, in the form of “PCI pass-through” (dedicating parts of physical NICs to each virtual machine) and even bouncing traffic through physical switches to handle data forwarding and replication. In this paper, the authors show that, with a proper design, very high speed communication between virtual machines can be achieved completely in software. Their architecture, called VALE, implements a Virtual Local Ethernet that can be used by virtual machines, such as QEMU, KVM and others, as well as by regular processes.

Subscribe to the Developer Insider Newsletter

From the hottest programming languages to commentary on the Linux OS, get the developer and open source news and tips you need to know. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays

Subscribe to the Developer Insider Newsletter

From the hottest programming languages to commentary on the Linux OS, get the developer and open source news and tips you need to know. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays

Resource Details

Provided by:
Association for Computing Machinery
Topic:
Networking
Format:
PDF