Managing large-scale data centers and cloud environments can be incredibly complex, with challenges ranging from traffic congestion to maintaining high availability. The need for efficient, scalable, and reliable solutions is on the mind of most network engineers and network architects.

The combination of:

• Vector Packet Processing (VPP)
• Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC)
• Border Gateway Protocol Equal-Cost Multi-Path (BGP ECMP)

is a particularly useful and powerful option for optimizing large-scale data center and cloud environments.

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VPP, a high-performance software packet-processing framework, employs various techniques, including Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations, to optimize the processing of packets on general-purpose CPUs. These optimizations enable VPP to manage large volumes of traffic in parallel, significantly enhancing throughput.

Complementing this, SONiC is an open-source network operating system designed for cloud-scale data centers, offering a modular and flexible architecture for deploying a comprehensive suite of network functions across various hardware platforms.

Thanks to its integration with VPP, SONiC can now be deployed on general-purpose hardware.

This expansion allows SONiC to extend closer to compute nodes in data centers or even replace vendor hardware with generic purpose “pizza boxes.”

Additionally, BGP ECMP enables the distribution of network traffic across multiple equal-cost paths, ensuring load balancing, redundancy, and efficient bandwidth utilization. Together, these technologies provide scalable, reliable, and efficient solutions for managing complex and demanding network infrastructures.

SONiC VPP Architecture

The architecture of SONiC-VPP closely mirrors the foundational SONiC architecture. In this setup, the syncd component interfaces with VPP through the shared library libsaivpp.so. SONiC’s architecture allows integration with the FRRouting project, which typically encompasses daemons for various routing protocols, including BGP and OSPF.

VPP, on the other hand, uses the linux-cp plugin, which can create a TAP interface in Linux and copy attributes from the VPP interface, effectively mirroring the VPP hardware interface to the kernel. All synchronization is then managed by the netlink listener, which listens for netlink messages and executes the corresponding events in VPP. Supported events include (RTM_LINK, RTM_ADDR, RTM_*ROUTE).

Normally, the linux-cp plugin would suffice for this use-case. However, SONiC uses two approaches:

1. The syncd process (e.g., portsyncd) listens to netlink messages from the kernel.
2. The syncd process (fpmsyncd) listens to netlink messages using the FPM protocol from Zebra. This bypasses the handling of RTM_*ROUTE messages in linux-cp, which only listens to kernel netlink messages.

Both these approaches ensure that SONiC-vpp can effectively handle complex networking requirements while maintaining synchronization between the VPP data plane and SONiC control plane. This seamless integration of SONiC and VPP provides a robust and flexible solution for managing advanced routing protocols and network interfaces in large-scale data center environments.

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