st machine hardware to independently oper- ate one or more virtual machines as guests, allowing multiple guest virtual machines to effectively share the system's physical compute resources, such as processor cycles, memory space, and network bandwidth. A virtual switch is a software program that allows one virtual machine to communicate with another. Similar to its counterpart, the physical Ethernet switch, a virtual switch does more than just forwarding data packets. It can intelligently direct communication on the network by inspecting packets before forwarding them. Some vendors embed virtual switches into their virtualization software, but a virtual switch can also be included in a server's hardware as part of its firmware. Open vSwitch is an open-source implementation of a distributed virtual multilayer switch. The main purpose of Open vSwitch is to provide a switching stack for hardware vir- tualization environments, while supporting multiple protocols and standards used in computer networks. Data plane development kit is a set of data-plane libraries and network interface controller drivers for fast packet processing from Intel Corporation. The data plane development kit provides a programming frame- work for x86-based servers and enables faster development of high-speed data packet networking applica- tions. The data plane development kit framework creates a set of libraries for specific hardware/software environments through the creation of an environment abstraction layer. The environment abstraction layer conceals the environmental-specific parameters and provides a standard programming interface to libraries, available hardware accelerators, and other hardware and operating system (Linux, FreeBSD) elements. A virtual machine is an operating system or application environment that is installed on software, which imi- tates dedicated hardware. The end user has the same experience on a virtual machine as they would have on dedicated hardware. 14 Chapter 1 Bin/Libs Container Container Bare metal Guest os H