Tuning KVM to enhance virtual routing performance

This paper shows how to use an open virtualisation architecture to analyse and improve the forwarding performance of a virtual router. In particular, the forwarding performance of the Linux kernel running inside a KVM virtual machine and the performance of some more advanced architectures based on virtual routers aggregation are analysed, showing how increasing the number of used CPU core can improve performance and how properly setting the CPU affinity of the various virtualisation activities affects virtual router throughput.