Today, VMware released a new technical whitepaper for performance tuning of Telco and NFV workloads in vSphere. You can download the paper here: https://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10479
From the document description:
The vSphere ESXi hypervisor provides a high-performance and competitive platform that effectively runs many Tier 1 application workloads in virtual machines. By default, ESXi has been heavily tuned for driving high I/O throughput efficiently by utilizing fewer CPU cycles and conserving power, as required by a wide range of workloads.
However, Telco and NFV application workloads are different from the typical Tier I enterprise application workloads, in that they tend to be any combination of latency sensitive, jitter sensitive, or demanding high packet rate throughputs or aggregate bandwidth, and therefore need to be tuned for best performance on vSphere ESXi.
This white paper summarizes the findings and recommends best practices to tune the different layers of an application’s environment for Telco and NFV workloads.