The VM-Series firewall for KVM is a high-performance appliance but may require tuning of the hypervisor to achieve the best results. This section describes some best practices and recommendations for facilitating the best performance of the VM-Series firewall.

By default, KVM uses a linux bridge for VM networking. However, the best performance in a virtual environment is realized with dedicated I/O interfaces (PCI passthrough or SR-IOV). If a virtual switch is required, use a performance-optimized virtual switch (such as Open vSwitch with DPDK).