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In this paper we present Metron, a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform that achieves high resource utilization by jointly exploiting the underlying network and commodity servers’ resources. This synergy allows Metron to:(i) offload part of the packet processing logic to the network,(ii) use smart tagging to setup and exploit the affinity of traffic classes, and (iii) use tag-based hardware dispatching to carry out the remaining packet processing at the speed of the servers’ fastest cache (s), with zero intercore communication. Metron also introduces a novel resource allocation scheme that minimizes the resource allocation overhead for large-scale NFV deployments. With commodity hardware assistance, Metron deeply inspects traffic at 40 Gbps and realizes stateful network functions at the speed of a 100 GbE network card on a single server. Metron has 2.75-6.5 x better efficiency than OpenBox, a state of the art NFV system, while ensuring key requirements such as elasticity, fine-grained load balancing, and flexible traffic steering.