heleos Distributed Virtual Appliance

A heleos DVA is a logical network service container that is instantiated across a pool of general-purpose x86 servers.  It provides scalable, elastic, high-performance networking services on-demand. The fundamental architecture of a DVA is similar to physical hardware appliances, but the components have been decoupled through virtualization and architected for scale-out. 

A DVA is implemented by aggregating the compute power of several virtual compute resources, called Compute Units (CU). Compute Units provide granular access to x86 compute resources (a core or fraction of a core) and give cloud service providers the freedom to decouple their choice of x86 server hardware and virtualization technology from the implementation of network services.  Compute Units provide an abstraction layer above the physical hardware that shields network and IT administrators from underlying deployment complexities. DVAs are the key to delivering truly elastic services and eliminating capacity planning complexities.  IT teams can dynamically grow and shrink DVAs in real-time by simply adding or removing CUs in a non-disruptive manner, without introducing management complexity. 

Within each DVA there are three classes of CUs.  A DVA must have at least one of each of the following:

• Data Plane (DP) – runs the network service stack and applies all administratively-defined policies
• Data Planes Dispatcher (DPD) – responsible for the layer 2 packet processing within each DVA to direct in-bound packets to DPs as well as forwarding out-bound traffic outside of a DVA
• Data Planes Manager (DPM) – the control plane within a DVA that oversees the internal operation of a DVA and distributes policy and configuration information to DPs and DPDs

Compute Units are interconnected via in-band and out-of-band logical busses. The DPM is connected to the other compute units via an out-of-band bus used for the control plane. The DPDs and DPs are connected via an in-band bus for packet and flow distribution.