3 .. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
4 .. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
5 .. (c) Open Platform for NFV Project, Inc. and its contributors
14 Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is transforming the networking industry via
15 software-defined infrastructures and open source is the proven method for quickly developing
16 software for commercial products and services that can move markets.
17 Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV
18 components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration,
19 deployment and testing, OPNFV constructs a reference NFV platform to accelerate the
20 transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.
21 As an open source project, OPNFV is uniquely positioned to bring together the work
22 of standards bodies, open source communities, service providers and commercial suppliers to deliver
23 a de facto NFV platform for the industry.
25 By integrating components from upstream projects, the community is able to conduct performance
26 and use case-based testing on a variety of solutions to ensure the platform’s suitability for
27 NFV use cases. OPNFV also works upstream with other open source communities to bring contributions
28 and learnings from its work directly to those communities in the form of blueprints, patches, bugs,
31 OPNFV focuses on building NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualized Infrastructure Management (VIM) by
32 integrating components from upstream projects such as OpenDaylight, OVN, OpenStack, Kubernetes,
33 Ceph Storage, KVM, Open vSwitch, Linux, DPDK and FD.io. OPNFV- is able to run on both Intel and
34 ARM commercial and white-box hardware, support VM, Container and BareMetal workloads.
36 These capabilities, along with application programmable interfaces (APIs) to other NFV
37 elements, form the basic infrastructure required for Virtualized Network Functions (VNF)
40 Concentrating on these components, OPNFV aims to enhance
41 NFV services by increasing performance and power efficiency improving reliability,
42 availability and serviceability, and delivering comprehensive platform instrumentation.
45 OPNFV Platform Architecture
46 ===========================
48 The OPNFV project addresses a number of aspects in the development of a consistent virtualisation
49 platform including common hardware requirements, software architecture, MANO and applications.
52 OPNFV Platform Overview Diagram
54 .. image:: ../images/hunter.png
55 :alt: Overview infographic of the opnfv platform and projects.
58 To address these areas effectively, the OPNFV platform architecture can be decomposed
59 into the following basic building blocks:
61 * Hardware: Infrastructure working group, Pharos project and associated activities
62 * Software Platform: Platform integration and deployment projects
63 * Tooling and testing: Testing working group and test projects
64 * Applications: All other areas and drive requirements for OPNFV
66 OPNFV Lab Infrastructure
67 ========================
69 The infrastructure working group oversees such topics as lab management, workflow,
70 definitions, metrics and tools for OPNFV infrastructure.
72 Fundamental to the WG is the
73 `Pharos Specification <https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/pharos/Pharos+Specification>`_
74 which provides a set of defined lab infrastructures over a geographically and technically
75 diverse federated global OPNFV lab.
77 Labs may instantiate bare-metal and virtual environments that are accessed remotely by the
78 community and used for OPNFV platform and feature development, build, deploy and testing.
79 No two labs are the same and the heterogeneity of the Pharos environment provides the ideal
80 platform for establishing hardware and software abstractions providing well understood
81 performance characteristics.
83 Community labs are hosted by OPNFV member companies on a voluntary basis.
84 The Linux Foundation also hosts an OPNFV lab that provides centralized CI
85 and other production resources which are linked to community labs.
87 The Lab-as-a-service (LaaS) offering provides developers to readily access NFV infrastructure on demand.
88 Ongoing lab capabilities will include the ability to easily automate deployment and test of any OPNFV install
89 scenario in any lab environment using a concept called “Dynamic CI”.
91 OPNFV Software Platform Architecture
92 ====================================
94 The OPNFV software platform is comprised exclusively of open source implementations of
95 platform component pieces. OPNFV is able to draw from the rich ecosystem of NFV related
96 technologies available in open source communities, and then integrate, test, measure and improve these
97 components in conjunction with our upstream communities.
99 ---------------------------------
100 Virtual Infrastructure Management
101 ---------------------------------
103 OPNFV derives its Virtual Infrastructure Management from OpenStack and Kubernetes. OpenStack provides a
104 complete reference cloud management system and associated technologies. While the OpenStack community
105 sustains a broad set of projects, not all technologies are relevant in the NFV domain, the OPNFV community
106 consumes a sub-set of OpenStack projects and the usage and composition may vary depending on the installer and scenario.
107 Additionally, OPNFV also uses Kubernetes, the popular Container Orchestration Engine. Kubernetes is intended to be a VIM for
108 Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs).
110 For details on the scenarios available in OPNFV and the specific composition of components
111 refer to the :ref:`OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide <opnfv-user-config>`.
117 OPNFV currently uses Linux on all target machines. The
118 specific version of Linux used for any deployment is documented in the installation guide.
120 Networking Technologies
121 =======================
126 OPNFV, as an NFV focused project, has a significant investment on networking technologies
127 and provides a broad variety of integrated open source reference solutions. The diversity
128 of controllers able to be used in OPNFV is supported by a similarly diverse set of
129 forwarding technologies.
131 There are many SDN controllers available today relevant to virtual environments
132 where the OPNFV community supports and contributes to a number of these. The controllers
133 being worked on by the community during this release of OPNFV include:
135 * Neutron: an OpenStack project to provide “network connectivity as a service” between
136 interface devices (e.g., vNICs) managed by other OpenStack services (e.g. Nova).
137 * OpenDaylight: addresses multivendor, traditional and greenfield networks, establishing the
138 industry’s de facto SDN platform and providing the foundation for networks of the future.
139 * OVN: a distributed control-plane on top of the popular Open vSwitch (OVS) offers network virtualization
145 OPNFV extends Linux virtual networking capabilities by using virtual switching
146 and routing components. The OPNFV community proactively engages with the following open source
147 communities to address performance, scale and resiliency needs apparent in carrier
150 * OVS (Open vSwitch): a production quality, multilayer virtual switch designed to enable massive
151 network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols.
152 * FD.io (Fast data - Input/Output): a high performance alternative to Open vSwitch, the core engine of
153 FD.io is a vector processing engine (VPP). VPP processes a number of packets in parallel instead of one at
154 a time thus significantly improving packet throughput.
155 * DPDK: a set of libraries that bypass the kernel and provide polling mechanisms, instead of interrupt based operations,
156 to speed up packet processing. DPDK works with both OVS and FD.io.
158 Deployment Architecture
159 =======================
161 A typical OPNFV deployment starts with three controller nodes running in a high availability
162 configuration including control plane components from OpenStack, SDN controllers, etc. and a minimum
163 of two compute nodes for deployment of workloads (VNFs).
164 A detailed description of the hardware requirements required to support the 5 node configuration
165 can be found in pharos specification: `Pharos Project <https://www.opnfv.org/developers/pharos>`_
167 In addition to the deployment on a highly available physical infrastructure, OPNFV can be
168 deployed for development and lab purposes in a virtual environment. In this case each of the hosts
169 is provided by a virtual machine and allows control and workload placement using nested virtualization.
171 The initial deployment is done using a staging server, referred to as the "jumphost".
172 This server-either physical or virtual-is first installed with the installation program
173 that then installs OpenStack and other components on the controller nodes and compute nodes.
174 See the :ref:`OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide <opnfv-user-config>` for more details.
177 The OPNFV Testing Ecosystem
178 ===========================
180 The OPNFV community has set out to address the needs of virtualization in the carrier
181 network and as such platform validation and measurements are a cornerstone to the
182 iterative releases and objectives.
184 To simplify the complex task of feature, component and platform validation and characterization
185 the testing community has established a fully automated method for addressing all key areas of
186 platform validation. This required the integration of a variety of testing frameworks in our CI
187 systems, real time and automated analysis of results, storage and publication of key facts for
188 each run as shown in the following diagram.
190 .. image:: ../images/OPNFV_testing_working_group.png
191 :alt: Overview infographic of the OPNFV testing Ecosystem
196 The OPNFV community relies on its testing community to establish release criteria for each OPNFV
197 release. With each release cycle the testing criteria become more stringent and better representative
198 of our feature and resiliency requirements. Each release establishes a set of deployment scenarios to validate,
199 the testing infrastructure and test suites need to accommodate these features and capabilities.
201 The release criteria as established by the testing teams include passing a set of test cases
202 derived from the functional testing project ‘functest,’ a set of test cases derived from our
203 platform system and performance test project ‘yardstick,’ and a selection of test cases for
204 feature capabilities derived from other test projects such as bottlenecks, vsperf, cperf and
205 storperf. The scenario needs to be able to be deployed, pass these tests, and be removed from
206 the infrastructure iteratively in order to fulfill the release criteria.
211 Functest provides a functional testing framework incorporating a number of test suites
212 and test cases that test and verify OPNFV platform functionality.
213 The scope of Functest and relevant test cases can be found in the :ref:`Functest User Guide <functest-userguide>`
215 Functest provides both feature project and component test suite integration, leveraging
216 OpenStack and SDN controllers testing frameworks to verify the key components of the OPNFV
217 platform are running successfully.
222 Yardstick is a testing project for verifying the infrastructure compliance when running VNF applications.
223 Yardstick benchmarks a number of characteristics and performance vectors on the infrastructure making it
224 a valuable pre-deployment NFVI testing tools.
226 Yardstick provides a flexible testing framework for launching other OPNFV testing projects.
228 There are two types of test cases in Yardstick:
230 * Yardstick generic test cases and OPNFV feature test cases;
231 including basic characteristics benchmarking in compute/storage/network area.
232 * OPNFV feature test cases include basic telecom feature testing from OPNFV projects;
233 for example nfv-kvm, sfc, ipv6, Parser, Availability and SDN VPN
235 With the addition of the Network Service Benchmarking (NSB) initiative, it is possible to use Yardstick NSB
236 for benchmarking the performance of VNFs and Network Services.
238 System Evaluation and compliance testing
239 ========================================
241 The OPNFV community is developing a set of test suites intended to evaluate a set of reference
242 behaviors and capabilities for NFV systems developed externally from the OPNFV ecosystem to
243 evaluate and measure their ability to provide the features and capabilities developed in the
246 The Dovetail project provides a test framework and methodology able to be used on any NFV platform,
247 including an agreed set of test cases establishing an evaluation criteria for exercising
248 an OPNFV compatible system.
253 Besides the test suites and cases for release verification, additional testing is performed to validate
254 specific features or characteristics of the OPNFV platform.
255 These testing framework and test cases may include some specific needs; such as extended measurements,
256 additional testing stimuli, or tests simulating environmental disturbances or failures.
258 These additional testing activities provide a more complete evaluation of the OPNFV platform.
259 Some of the projects focused on these testing areas include:
264 Bottlenecks provides a framework to find system limitations and bottlenecks, providing
265 root cause isolation capabilities to facilitate system evaluation.
270 NFVbench is a lightweight end-to-end dataplane benchmarking framework project.
271 It includes traffic generator(s) and measures a number of packet performance related metrics.
276 Storperf measures the performance of external block storage. The goal of this project is
277 to provide a report based on SNIA’s (Storage Networking Industry Association) Performance Test Specification.
282 VSPERF provides an automated test-framework and comprehensive test suite for measuring data-plane
283 performance of the NFVI including switching technology, physical and virtual network interfaces.
284 The provided test cases with network topologies can be customized while also allowing individual
285 versions of Operating System, vSwitch and hypervisor to be specified.
290 .. _`OPNFV Configuration Guide`: `OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide`
291 .. _`OPNFV User Guide`: `OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide`
292 .. _`Dovetail project`: https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/dovetail
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