It turns out, that the Realtek network adaptors on that server, are, in fact, not supported! Duh. This has nothing to do with VPP. It has to do with the underlying Data Plane Development Kit, on which VPP resides as a layer on top of (in other words, VPP uses DPDK libraries).
The DPDK site lists the adaptors that are supported, on this page of their website, entitled, "Supported Hardware".
http://core.dpdk.org/supported/
Sure enough, no long-in-the-tooth RealTek NICs are listed here.
So what would you do (on that server) to test and experiment with VPP?
- Well, you could swap out the adaptors. If you do that, you better make sure you think about static IP assignments based on MAC address because all of your MACs will change.
- You could use a virtual adaptor that is supported.
Or, you could simply find another server. Which I did. And this server is using Intel adaptors that ARE supported.
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| VPP Startup with Supported Adaptors |
Next, I ran the "vppctl list plugins" command, which dumped out a ton of .so (shared object) files.
These files are shared libraries, essentially. Rather than linking stuff into all of the binaries (making them larger), a shared object or shared library accommodates multiple binaries using the code (they get their own local data segments but share a pointer to the code segment - as I understand it).
So - it looks like we have a working VPP service on this service. Yay. What next? Well, here are a couple of possibilities:
1. OpenStack has a Neutron VPP driver. That could be interesting to look into, and see what it's all about, and how well it works.
2. Maybe there are some ways of using or testing VPP in a standalone way. For example, some test clients.
I think I will look into number 2 first. At this point, I am only interested in functional testing here. I am not doing any kind of performance bake-offs. Not even sure I have the environment and tools for that right now. We're just learning here.
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