Hardware Assisted NAT

[rrajmohan]

What is hardware assisted NAT? What are its disadvantages, will it result in high CPU utilization

[Philip D'Ath]

Its when you have silicon with NAT functionality.  It should result in the CPU having less work to do.

[Reza Sharifi]

It means that NAT can't be handled entirely by the hardware and needs assistant from the software (CPU). If you are doing a few NAT statements, it may not be significant, but if you are deploying a lot of NAT statements you want to watch the CPU.

HTH

[rrajmohan]

Thank you Reza, for your clarification. Following are few of my addition queries.

Hardware NAT:

Assuming that NAT is handled fully in hardware, how does the NAT translation occurs.

Are the NAT rules get pre-programmed in some sort of hardware.

Will there be some interrupt / sub-routines to handle NAT translations.

How CPU is totally taken off from NAT jobs.

Hardware-Assited NAT:

Which part of NAT function is handled by hardware.

What are NAT translation condition which requires assistance from CPU