5.4. Network Tuning Techniques This section describes techniques for tuning network performance in virtualized environments. Important The following features are supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 hypervisors and virtual machines, but also on virtual machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 and later. 5.4.1. Bridge Zero Copy Transmit Zero copy transmit mode is effective on large packet sizes. It typically reduces the host CPU overhead by up to 15% when transmitting large packets between a guest network and an external network, without affecting throughput. It does not affect performance for guest-to-guest, guest-to-host, or small packet workloads. Bridge zero copy transmit is fully supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 virtual machines, but disabled by default. To enable zero copy transmit mode, set the experimental_zcopytx kernel module parameter for the vhost_net module to 1. For detailed instructions, see the Virtualization Deployment and Administration Guide . Note An additional data copy is normally created during transmit as a threat mitigation technique against denial of service and information leak attacks. Enabling zero copy transmit disables this threat mitigation technique. If performance regression is observed, or if host CPU utilization is not a concern, zero copy transmit mode can be disabled by setting experimental_zcopytx to 0. 5.4.2. Multi-Queue virtio-net Multi-queue virtio-net provides an approach that scales the network performance as the number of vCPUs increases, by allowing them to transfer packets through more than one virtqueue pair at a time. Today's high-end servers have more processors, and guests running on them often have an increasing number of vCPUs. In single queue virtio-net, the scale of the protocol stack in a guest is restricted, as the network performance does not scale as the number of vCPUs increases. Guests cannot transmit or retrieve packets in parallel, as virtio-net has only one TX and RX queue. Multi-queue support removes these bottlenecks by allowing paralleled packet processing. Multi-queue virtio-net provides the greatest performance benefit when: Traffic packets are relatively large. The guest is active on many connections at the same time, with traffic running between guests, guest to host, or guest to an external system. The number of queues is equal to the number of vCPUs. This is because multi-queue support optimizes RX interrupt affinity and TX queue selection in order to make a specific queue private to a specific vCPU. Note Currently, setting up a multi-queue virtio-net connection can have a negative effect on the performance of outgoing traffic. Specifically, this may occur when sending packets under 1,500 bytes over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) stream. For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase . 5.4.2.1. Configuring Multi-Queue virtio-net To use multi-queue virtio-net, enable support in the guest by adding the following to the guest XML configuration (where the value of N is from 1 to 256, as the kernel supports up to 256 queues for a multi-queue tap device): When running a virtual machine with N virtio-net queues in the guest, enable the multi-queue support with the following command (where the value of M is from 1 to N ):

Commands:
<interface type='network'> <source network='default'/> <model type='virtio'/> <driver name='vhost' queues='N'/> </interface>
ethtool -L eth0 combined M