VALE, a switched ethernet for virtual machines

With the use of virtual machines becoming more and more popular, the need for high performance communication between them also grows. Past solutions have seen the use of hardware assistance, in the form of “PCI passthrough”(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 we show that, with a proper design, very high speed communication between virtual machines can be implemented completely in ...