Open Traffic Generator, SAI Challenger and the DASH Use-Case

Open Traffic Generator, SAI Challenger and the DASH Use-Case

白書

Microsoft approached Keysight in the summer of 2021 to help create the authoritative testbed for SONiCDASH - a new Microsoft-led, community-based project to bring the performance and economic benefits of data processing units / infrastructure processing unit or DPUs/IPUs (“xPU”) to the datacenter in a standardized way. These xPUs perform high-scale, stateful (connection-based) infrastructure services (policy enforcement, tunneling, etc.) beyond the capabilities of standard switching application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). This paper illustrates how Keysight, partnering with PLVision, created a flexible, scalable solution for testing DASH’s SAI-based data plane, as used by SONiC, DENT, Facebook open switching system (FBOSS), and potentially other environments.

Keysight developed two distinct testbeds: one to test the raw performance of xPU hardware/software implementations, using hardware-based Layer 4-7 packet testers; and one to test Layer 2-3 using software or hardware-based testers, and integrate into the GitHub CI pipeline. The Hardware-based L4-7 testbed is documented here. The focus of this whitepaper is on the latter.