Exploring the Network Scale-out in Virtualized Servers

Nowadays, servers are popularly virtualized and highly consolidated, requiring much more network capacity than ever before. While scaling up the capacity of the network interface controllers (NICs) is inarguably important, we focus on the alternative and explore how to scale out the network capacity by aggregating multiple NICs. In this paper, we discuss the various requirements and problems of the NIC aggregation in virtualized servers and propose packet scheduling and load balance algorithms taking into consideration of the heterogeneity of NIC capacity and different priorities of the hosted VMs.