VNF Performance

In NFV solutions, the data traffic has two patterns, north south and east west.

North to south traffic comes from the hosting server into a physical NIC and is sent to a VNF.

The traffic is then sent to the VNF back out of the physical wire through to the physical NIC.

East west traffic comes into the hosting server through a physical NIC and is sent to a VNF. From there it may be sent to another VNF and possibly service chained to many more VNFs then sent back out of a physical NIC to physical wire.

There can combinations of both where a VNF uses a north to south pattern for user data and a east west traffic pattern to send traffic to a VNF that is collecting statistics or is being used for logs or storage.