ConnectX-4 vs ConnectX-5 for NFV purposes

Infrastructure & Networking Switches and Gateways InfiniBand/VPI Switch Systems
1

Looking at the specs of ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-5, it looks like the 5 is more suitable for NFV/DPDK environments. " Together with native RDMA and RoCE support, ConnectX-5 dramatically improves Cloud and NFV platform efficiency. " However, there is no concrete justification about that.

My idea is to use this card to achieve high network performance when adding virtualization layers on top of OVS/VPP with DPDK. Is there any benefit of getting X5 instead of X4 in this scenario?

2

ConnectX-5 provides roughly ~25% more performances than ConnectX-4 if using more than 1 queue with DPDK.

Also ConnectX-5 capable of packet header rewrite for open flow steering rules.

Thanks,

Amir

3

Thanks for your answer. The documentation doesn’t say much about the differences and why X-5 is better for NFV use cases.