In a non-virtualised environment, traffic that is sent to a device is received by a physical NIC then sent through the kernel space to the application in the user space.
In a virtual environment, there are physical NICs and virtual NICs with a hypervisor with a virtual switch between them.
The hypervisor and virtual switch take the data from the physical NIC and send it to the virtual NIC of the VM/VNF then to the application.
The addition of the virtual layer can create additional packet processing and introduce a bottleneck reducing I/O packet throughput.
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