Enhanced Data Path - High Performance Switch

This is part of VMware's platform for managing and integrating virtualization, compute, storage, and networking in a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) environment.

Let’s break down what the Enhanced Data Path and the High-Performance Switch mean within the context of VCF:

Enhanced Data Path

• The Enhanced Data Path is a feature aimed at improving networking performance and optimizing data flow within a virtualized data center. It focuses on making network communication more efficient, reducing latency, and ensuring that data moves through the system at high speed with minimal overhead.

• In virtualized environments, traditional networking may introduce delays due to virtual switches and network overlays that handle the routing of traffic. The Enhanced Data Path helps streamline this process, particularly for workloads requiring high throughput, such as data-intensive applications, machine learning, or real-time processing.

• The Enhanced Data Path likely involves techniques like:

  • Direct data forwarding to reduce the need for virtual switch intervention, bypassing some software layers for faster throughput.
  • Optimized traffic flow management, especially for east-west traffic (VM-to-VM or storage-to-VM) inside the data center.
  • Improved tunneling and encapsulation in network overlays (e.g., VXLAN), ensuring that network packets are processed more efficiently.

High-Performance Switch

• The High-Performance Switch is SDN features in VMware NSX that are designed to enable high-throughput, low-latency, and scalable networking. These switches are designed to handle large-scale deployments and are optimized to work in virtualized environments.

• High-Performance Switch include:

  • Improved packet processing capabilities that are optimized for modern data center traffic patterns.
  • Efficient data plane processing, often leveraging hardware acceleration where available (such as DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) or SR-IOV for reducing virtualization overhead).
  • Support for traffic segmentation and QoS (Quality of Service) to prioritize critical workloads over less important traffic, ensuring predictable performance.
  • Enhanced Security: Security features like micro-segmentation and flow monitoring are integrated into these high-performance switches to protect the network without compromising performance.

How to enable:

To Enable during cluster addition via SDDC Manager (this feature is not enableds by default):

1. Under Switch Configuration
2. Select "Enhanced Datapath Interrupt"

It will be enables on all nodes of the cluster

Confirm which mode is in use:

•  Check the corresponding transport node profile in NSX Manager

How to enable using API:

POST: https:///v1/clusters
"name": "<vds-name>",
"'nsxtSwitchConfig" : ( 
"hostSwitchOperationalMode": "ENS-Interrupt"