The approaches described in this section could be pursued but are not necessarily approaches that have previously been conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Data centers are conventionally used to house computer systems and associated components (for example, telecommunications and storage systems). A data center generally includes a set of redundant devices, such as power supplies and data communications connections, environmental controls, and security devices. Trends in global technological development bring transformations to technical solutions related to organization of data centers. Such transformations relate to standardization, virtualization, automation, and security of the data centers. Virtualization technologies can be used to replace or consolidate multiple data center equipment. Virtualization may help to lower capital and operational expenses and reduce energy consumption.
Virtualized data centers are popular due to their ability to enable multiple virtual machines to share the same hardware in an over-subscribed way, because the usage of processing units (such as central processing units (CPUs)) and memory of virtual machines may not be in need of peak capacity at the same time. However, CPU utilization associated with traditional packet forwarding in a physical networking environment does not align with the needs of virtualized networks. In a physical networking environment, since the CPUs are entirely owned and utilized for network or security purposes, the CPU utilization practices need to utilize a run-to-complete model to use the CPU all the time, even in a low load scenario. Furthermore, tasks need to be divided to be processed in multiple CPUs at the same time. Thus, existing environments are not optimized for virtualized networks as they consume all available CPU resources regardless of the load. Additionally, constant running of high-priority tasks on all available CPUs prevents other applications or virtual machines from using the CPUs.