Hello connected fam! It has been several long minutes since I’ve had the pleasure of sharing the hot ongoings in my work world.. so here it goes:

I’ve been blogging here (on what was previously HCX.DESIGN and is now vcfcore.tech) for nearly seven years, on topics related to cloud and datacenter migration with VMware HCX, giving you all of the updates and ongoings right from within the product organization.

Along with many colleagues, many who have moved on to new adventures, I’ve been navigating challenging new waters under the Broadcom banner. I’m still within what was the “Networking & Security Business Unit”, which is now more correctly referred to as the VCF Networking within Core Product Management, in the VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom. It’s a mouthful, but that is where I’m at today 🙂.

My technology ownership area has also shifted from VMware HCX to VMware NSX, or VCF Networking, and more specifically, what we are doing to improve everyone’s network infrastructure performance with Enhanced Data Path (previously called ENS, or the Enhanced Network Stack). After injecting all of my passion and effort for so many years to HCX, it has been a growing experience to become immersed in something new. I’m pretty excited to share what I’ve learned, especially to folks looking to maximize their infrastructure investments.

If you are heavily involved with HCX powered migration and adoption of ‘what is new’ from VMware, I heavily encourage you to read on, and ensure Enhanced Data Path is enabled, and maximizing your investment at the HCX destination. If you are reading because you need to know the latest HCX innovations, please reach out to my colleagues & good friends Emad Younis & Frances Wong who have taken the Product Management baton for HCX.

Enhanced Data Path – What is this?

Enhanced Data Path (EDP) is a network stack, or packet forwarding stack, designed to provide superior performance in terms of throughput, packet rate, latency and CPU utilization. The EDP Standard mode of EDP is built to provide a performant alternative to the Standard (default) stack. EDP is suitable for general compute workloads, network workloads and niche workloads like NSX Edge, and telco NFV solutions.

Why does it matter?

🤔 Gabe, tell me (in relatable terms) why I should spend my precious time & effort considering Enhanced Data Path?”

🧐 Lets use a car analogy (to celebrate F1 75 🏎️) …

Imagine every server in your farm is a car… maybe a modest car; maybe something modern and furiously fast. Your workloads are the passengers, moving around within the performance boundaries of each car. In this example Enhanced Data Path is a super sports mode button that makes the car go 50-70% faster all while very significantly improving fuel efficiency.

Turning on EDP is like transforming every server into high sports car that is also a fuel efficient hybrid.

EDP & THE ESXi NETWORK STACK

Lets digress for a bit.. we’ve already said that Enhanced Data Path (EDP) is a network stack. What exactly do we mean by this?

The network stack (in this context) is the core ESXi kernel subsystem responsible for all network input/output (packet processing). In an ESXi system, the network stack encompasses many networking layer functionalities, some examples:

• Control over pNIC hardware through inbox drivers (included in the ESXi installation image) or async drivers (provided by theNIC hardware vendors).
• Packet forwarding for VMkernel host services like vMotion.
• All virtual machine vNIC communications. A virtual machine interfaces with the network stack using emulated vNIC drivers like the E1000 or paravirtualized drivers like VMXNET3.
• Everything that happens to a network packet as it arrives at the pNIC until it is delivered to the virtual machine vNIC (and likewise, the delivery of virtual guest packets from a vNIC to the pNIC).

Any ESXi functionality related to sending (TX), receiving (RX) and processing of network packets is handled by “the network stack”.

There’s always a network stack at play. When EDP is not enabled, we say the ESXi server is running the Standard stack, moving packets, albeit not at the best possible performance.

Network Stack Modes

There are three network stack modes available for a vSphere environment:

1. Standard Datapath (or just ‘Standard’). ESXi hypervisors using the vSphere Standard Switch, the vSphere Distributed Switch where EDP has not been enabled is using the standard network stack.
   
2. Enhanced Datapath – Standard This is an alternative to the standard stack that provides higher packet processing rates and more efficient resource utilization than the standard stack. EDP Standard can be enabled in vSphere deployments running NSX 4.2 & VCF 5.2 (more details to come in a follow up post).
   
   This EDP mode will be my focus in subsequent posts!
   
3. Enhanced Datapath – Dedicated This mode is designed with Telco NFV platforms and use cases . Custom VNF workloads with prescriptive traffic patterns, and tuning requirements. This mode is for telco shops who can use their expertise for traffic dimensioning and core allocation, and for factories using closed SCADA and mechanical systems with special network needs.

What’s Next

I hope you’ve learned something about EDP & the networking stack. In my next post I want to discuss:

• (Can I / Should I) use EDP Standard? Basic requirements & recommendations.
• How to enable EDP Standard in production.
• EDP history & deep dive topics.

If you need to know more about EDP now – I encourage you to check out the NSX Install & Admin (version 4.2) which have been tremendously overhauled to help all readers understand and enable Enhanced Data Path. And if you have any questions, please hit me up here.

—
Gabe
P.S. The home front is as wild as ever! The oldest has a driver’s permit. The youngest is growing up too fast 🥲.