So... I did end up opening a ticket.
Turns out:
dataplane nat max-translations-per-thread 1000000
dataplane cpu workers 1
Then restarting the dataplane got things working.
However, I starting thinking (perhaps wrongly) that in order to get the full throughput out of this XG-1537, I really should have more workers, otherwise most of the cores would just be sitting idle.
So, I changed "cpu workers" to 2, and restarted dataplane - it would not come up.... changing workers back to 1 worked fine...
Next, I figured maybe 2 million translations was somehow "maxing out" the box. (It has 16Gig of RAM). OK, I'll reduce to 200k translations-per-thread, and spin up 3 workers. That seemed to work fine, as the primary web server based on the LAN was processing transactions no problem.
However, the next morning, I found out that this "somehow" broke other simple static NAT rules being used for small services (remote SSH access to a couple hosts, etc.) Moved it back to 1 million max-translations-per-thread and a single worker. Fixed.
Very puzzing.... Can I process 10gig worth of traffic through the box, most of it NATed to an internal webserver with only the single worker? If so, That's fine I guess...
Anyone have any thoughts? Am I doing something "unusual" here? I know networking, but this is my first experience with VPP.
Thanks,
Dan