Intel Corporation
Technologies for hairpinning network traffic

Abstract:

Technologies for hairpinning network traffic include a compute device with a network interface controller (NIC) configured to receive, by a virtual Ethernet port aggregator (VEPA) agent of a media access control (MAC) of the NIC, a network packet from a virtual machine (VM). The VEPA agent is configured to transmit the received network packet to an agent deployed on an accelerator device of the NIC and the agent is configured to forward the received network packet to a virtual Ethernet bridge (VEB) hairpin agent of the accelerator device. The VEB hairpin agent is configured to determine whether a target destination of the network packet corresponds to another VM, return the received network packet to the agent deployed the accelerator device. The agent is further configured to forward the received network packet to the VEPA agent, which is further configured to transmit the received network packet to the other VM.