VPP Dataplane Requirements

VPP Dataplane requires specific hardware. Ensure your system meets these prerequisites before enabling VPP:

Deployment Platform

VPP Dataplane is available on both bare-metal, on-premise virtualized, and cloud deployment platforms.
CPU Requirements

Regardless of the platform, VPP Dataplane requires a CPU with:
- SSE4.2 support (available on most modern Intel and AMD CPUs).
- At least 4 physical CPU cores for a minimum configuration (more cores recommended for higher throughput).
Important

Physical Cores vs Logical Cores

VPP Dataplane requires 4 physical CPU cores, not logical cores. Systems with Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) or Hyper-Threading (HT) present each physical core as 2 logical cores.

Cloud providers often display logical cores as “cores” or “vCPUs”. For example, a cloud instance showing “4 cores” may have only 2 physical cores with SMT/HT enabled. Always verify the actual physical core count in your cloud provider’s documentation.

For virtualized environments, ensure CPU features are passed through to the VM and that sufficient physical cores are allocated.
Memory Requirements

Memory significantly affects VPP stability. Insufficient RAM can cause initialization failures or prevent the dataplane from starting.
- Minimum: 8 GB RAM. VyOS will not start the VPP Dataplane if less than 8 GB is available.
- Recommended: 16 GB or more (especially for high throughput, many interfaces, or large routing tables).

Network Interface Cards (NICs)

Warning

VyOS supports only specific NICs for the VPP dataplane. Using unsupported hardware may cause activation failures, initialization errors, crashes, or degraded performance.

When enabling VPP, VyOS checks detected network interfaces against a list of validated NICs. Validation is based on the PCI ID of the device or the kernel driver used by the interface.

Supported NICs:

Filter Type	Filter Value	NIC Name/Description	Platform Where NIC Can Be Found
PCI ID	15b3:1019	Mellanox Technologies MT28800 Family [ConnectX-5 Ex]	Bare-metal
PCI ID	15b3:101d	Mellanox Technologies MT2892 Family [ConnectX-6 Dx]	Bare-metal
PCI ID	15b3:101e	Mellanox Technologies ConnectX Family mlx5Gen Virtual Function	Oracle Cloud
PCI ID	8086:1592	Intel Corporation Ethernet Controller E810-C for QSFP	Bare-metal
PCI ID	1ae0:0042	Google, Inc. Compute Engine Virtual Ethernet [gVNIC]	Google Cloud
PCI ID	1af4:1000	Red Hat, Inc. Virtio network device	KVM-based hypervisors, including with Open vSwitch; Google Cloud
PCI ID	1d0f:ec20	Amazon.com, Inc. Elastic Network Adapter (ENA)	AWS
Kernel Driver	hv_netvsc	Microsoft Hyper-V network interface card	Microsoft Azure

If no supported NIC is detected, VPP activation will be rejected.

In testing or advanced deployments, unsupported hardware can be explicitly allowed in the configuration:

set vpp settings allow-unsupported-nics

Note

This option bypass the hardware validation checks for the specified devices. Stability and performance are not guaranteed when using unsupported NICs or drivers.