Hvbench: An open and scalable SDN network hypervisor benchmark

Software-defined networking (SDN) introduces a split between the forwarding plane and the control plane of modern network equipment. Furthermore, OpenFlow, as an open interface for SDN, fosters the development of logically centralized network operation systems (NOS). To allow multiple network operation systems accessing the same network, there is the concept of SDN hypervisors. Little is known about the performance characteristics of SDN hypervisors. Furthermore, there is a lack of scalable and realistic hypervisor benchmark tools capable of emulating dynamic load scenarios. In this paper, we present an extensible and distributed SDN hypervisor benchmarking framework based on flexible statistical request generators. The framework can be scaled out horizontally to multiple compute nodes that are centrally controlled and reconfigured at runtime. We present preliminary measurements of the CPU resource consumption of a hypervisor in a virtual environment. The results show that the performance characteristics of the hypervisor are different for dynamic load scenarios compared to static benchmarks. Furthermore, the results show that for the same overall request rate, multiple NOS increase the CPU load considerable compared to a single NOS.