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---
lastproofread: '2026-02-16'
---
(vpp-requirements)=
```{include} /_include/need_improvement.txt
```
# 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:
:::{list-table}
:widths: 15 18 40 35
:header-rows: 1
* - **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:
```{cfgcmd} set vpp settings allow-unsupported-nics
```
:::{note}
This option bypasses the hardware validation checks for the specified
devices. Stability and performance are not guaranteed when using
unsupported NICs or drivers.
:::
|
