1 .. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
2 .. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
3 .. (c) Open Platform for NFV Project, Inc. and its contributors
9 Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is transforming the networking industry via
10 software-defined infrastructures and open source is the proven method for developing
11 software quickly for commercial products and services that can move markets.
12 Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV
13 components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration,
14 deployment and testing, OPNFV constructs a reference NFV platform to accelerate the
15 transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.
16 As an open source project, OPNFV is uniquely positioned to bring together the work
17 of standards bodies, open source communities, and commercial suppliers to deliver a
18 de facto NFV platform for the industry.
20 By integrating components from upstream projects, the community is able to conduct performance
21 and use case-based testing on a variety of solutions to ensure the platform’s suitability for
22 NFV use cases. OPNFV also works upstream with other open source communities to bring both contributions
23 and learnings from its work directly to those communities in the form of blueprints, patches,
26 OPNFV initially focused on building NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualised Infrastructure
27 Management (VIM) by integrating components from upstream projects such as OpenDaylight,
28 OpenStack, Ceph Storage, KVM, Open vSwitch, and Linux.
29 More recently, OPNFV has extended its portfolio of forwarding solutions to include fd.io and ODP,
30 is able to run on both Intel and ARM commercial and white-box hardware, and includes
31 Management and Network Orchestration MANO components primarily for application composition
32 and management in the Colorado release.
34 These capabilities, along with application programmable interfaces (APIs) to other NFV
35 elements, form the basic infrastructure required for Virtualized Network Functions (VNF)
38 Concentrating on these components while also considering proposed projects on additional
39 topics (such as the MANO components and applications themselves), OPNFV aims to enhance
40 NFV services by increasing performance and power efficiency improving reliability,
41 availability and serviceability, and delivering comprehensive platform instrumentation.
43 ===========================
44 OPNFV Platform Architecture
45 ===========================
47 The OPNFV project addresses a number of aspects in the development of a consistent virtualisation
48 platform including common hardware requirements, software architecture, MANO and applications.
51 OPNFV Platform Overview Diagram
53 .. image:: ../images/opnfvplatformgraphic.png
54 :alt: Overview infographic of the opnfv platform and projects.
57 To address these areas effectively, the OPNFV platform architecture can be decomposed
58 into the following basic building blocks:
60 * Hardware: with the Infra working group, Pharos project and associated activities
61 * Software Platform: through the platform integration and deployment projects
62 * MANO: through the MANO working group and associated projects
63 * Applications: which affect all other areas and drive requirements for OPNFV
65 OPNFV Lab Infrastructure
66 ========================
68 The infrastructure working group oversees such topics as lab management, workflow,
69 definitions, metrics and tools for OPNFV infrastructure.
71 Fundamental to the WG is the `Pharos Project <https://www.opnfv.org/developers/pharos>`_
72 which provides a set of defined lab infrastructures over a geographically and technically
73 diverse federated global OPNFV lab.
75 Labs may instantiate bare-metal and virtual environments that are accessed remotely by the
76 community and used for OPNFV platform and feature development, build, deploy and testing.
77 No two labs are the same and the heterogeneity of the Pharos environment provides the ideal
78 platform for establishing hardware and software abstractions providing well understood
79 performance characteristics.
81 Community labs are hosted by OPNFV member companies on a voluntary basis.
82 The Linux Foundation also hosts an OPNFV lab that provides centralized CI
83 and other production resources which are linked to community labs.
84 Future lab capabilities will include the ability easily automate deploy and test of any
85 OPNFV install scenario in any lab environment as well as on a nested "lab as a service"
86 virtual infrastructure.
88 OPNFV Software Platform Architecture
89 ====================================
91 The OPNFV software platform is comprised exclusively of open source implementations of
92 platform component pieces. OPNFV is able to draw from the rich ecosystem of NFV related
93 technologies available in open-source then integrate, test, measure and improve these
94 components in conjunction with our source communities.
96 While the composition of the OPNFV software platform is highly complex and constituted of many
97 projects and components, a subset of these projects gain the most attention from the OPNFV community
98 to drive the development of new technologies and capabilities.
100 ---------------------------------
101 Virtual Infrastructure Management
102 ---------------------------------
104 OPNFV derives it's virtual infrastructure management from one of our largest upstream ecosystems
105 OpenStack. OpenStack provides a complete reference cloud management system and associated technologies.
106 While the OpenStack community sustains a broad set of projects, not all technologies are relevant in
107 an NFV domain, the OPNFV community consumes a sub-set of OpenStack projects where the usage and
108 composition may vary depending on the installer and scenario.
110 For details on the scenarios available in OPNFV and the specific composition of components
111 refer to the OPNFV installation instruction:
112 http://artifacts.opnfv.org/opnfvdocs/colorado/2.0/docs/installationprocedure/index.html
118 OPNFV currently uses Linux on all target machines, this can include Ubuntu, Centos or SUSE linux. The
119 specific version of Linux used for any deployment is documented in the installation guide.
121 -----------------------
122 Networking Technologies
123 -----------------------
128 OPNFV, as an NFV focused project, has a significant investment on networking technologies
129 and provides a broad variety of integrated open source reference solutions. The diversity
130 of controllers able to be used in OPNFV is supported by a similarly diverse set of
131 forwarding technologies.
133 There are many SDN controllers available today relevant to virtual environments
134 where the OPNFV community supports and contributes to a number of these. The controllers
135 being worked on by the community during this release of OPNFV include:
137 * Neutron: an OpenStack project to provide “network connectivity as a service” between
138 interface devices (e.g., vNICs) managed by other OpenStack services (e.g., nova).
139 * OpenDaylight: addresses multivendor, traditional and greenfield networks, establishing the
140 industry’s de facto SDN platform and providing the foundation for networks of the future.
141 * ONOS: a carrier-grade SDN network operating system designed for high availability,
142 performance, scale-out.
144 .. OpenContrail SDN controller is planned to be supported in the next release.
149 OPNFV extends Linux virtual networking capabilities by using virtual switching
150 and routing components. The OPNFV community proactively engages with these source
151 communities to address performance, scale and resiliency needs apparent in carrier
154 * FD.io (Fast data - Input/Output): a collection of several projects and libraries to
155 amplify the transformation that began with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to support
156 flexible, programmable and composable services on a generic hardware platform.
157 * Open vSwitch: a production quality, multilayer virtual switch designed to enable
158 massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard
159 management interfaces and protocols.
161 Deployment Architecture
162 =======================
164 A typical OPNFV deployment starts with three controller nodes running in a high availability
165 configuration including control plane components from OpenStack, SDN, etc. and a minimum
166 of two compute nodes for deployment of workloads (VNFs).
167 A detailed description of the hardware requirements required to support the 5 node configuration
168 can be found in pharos specification: http://artifacts.opnfv.org/pharos/colorado/2.0/docs/specification/index.html
170 In addition to the deployment on a highly available physical infrastructure, OPNFV can be
171 deployed for development and lab purposes in a virtual environment. In this case each of the hosts
172 is provided by a virtual machine and allows control and workload placement using nested virtualization.
174 The initial deployment is done using a staging server, referred to as the "jumphost".
175 This server-either physical or virtual-is first installed with the installation program
176 that then installs OpenStack and other components on the controller nodes and compute nodes.
177 See the `OPNFV User Guide`_ for more details.
179 ===========================
180 The OPNFV Testing Ecosystem
181 ===========================
183 The OPNFV community has set out to address the needs of virtualization in the carrier
184 network and as such platform validation and measurements are a cornerstone to the
185 iterative releases and objectives.
187 To simplify the complex task of feature, component and platform validation and characterization
188 the testing community has established a fully automated method for addressing all key areas of
189 platform validation. This required the integration of a variety of testing frameworks in our CI
190 systems, real time and automated analysis of results, storage and publication of key facts for
191 each run as shown in the following diagram.
193 .. image:: ../images/OPNFV_testing_group.png
194 :alt: Overview infographic of the Colorado OPNFV testing Ecosystem
199 The OPNFV community relies on its testing community to establish release criteria for each OPNFV
200 release. Each release cycle the testing criteria become more stringent and better representative
201 of our feature and resiliency requirements.
204 As each OPNFV release establishes a set of deployment scenarios to validate, the testing
205 infrastructure and test suites need to accommodate these features and capabilities. It’s not
206 only in the validation of the scenarios themselves where complexity increases, there are test
207 cases that require multiple datacenters to execute when evaluating features, including multisite
208 and distributed datacenter solutions.
210 The release criteria as established by the testing teams include passing a set of test cases
211 derived from the functional testing project ‘functest,’ a set of test cases derived from our
212 platform system and performance test project ‘yardstick,’ and a selection of test cases for
213 feature capabilities derived from other test projects such as bottlenecks, vsperf, cperf and
214 storperf. The scenario needs to be able to be deployed, pass these tests, and be removed from
215 the infrastructure iteratively (no less that 4 times) in order to fulfill the release criteria.
221 Functest provides a functional testing framework incorporating a number of test suites
222 and test cases that test and verify OPNFV platform functionality.
223 The scope of Functest and relevant test cases can be found in its
224 `user guide <http://artifacts.opnfv.org/functest/colorado/2.0/docs/userguide/index.html>`_.
226 Functest provides both feature project and component test suite integration, leveraging
227 OpenStack and SDN controllers testing frameworks to verify the key components of the OPNFV
228 platform are running successfully.
234 Yardstick is a testing project for verifying the infrastructure compliance when running VNF applications.
235 Yardstick benchmarks a number of characteristics and performance vectors on the infrastructure making it
236 a valuable pre-deployment NFVI testing tools.
238 Yardstick provides a flexible testing framework for launching other OPNFV testing projects.
240 There are two types of test cases in Yardstick:
242 * Yardstick generic test cases and OPNFV feature test cases;
243 including basic characteristics benchmarking in compute/storage/network area.
244 * OPNFV feature test cases include basic telecom feature testing from OPNFV projects;
245 for example nfv-kvm, sfc, ipv6, Parser, Availability and SDN VPN
247 System Evaluation and compliance testing
248 ========================================
250 The OPNFV community is developing a set of test suites intended to evaluate a set of reference
251 behaviors and capabilities for NFV systems developed externally from the OPNFV ecosystem to
252 evaluate and measure their ability to provide the features and capabilities developed in the
255 The Dovetail project will provide a test framework and methodology able to be used on any NFV platform,
256 including an agreed set of test cases establishing an evaluation criteria for exercising
257 an OPNFV compatible system. The Dovetail project has begun establishing the test framework
258 and will provide a preliminary methodology for the Colorado release. Work will continue to
259 develop these test cases to establish a stand alone compliance evaluation solution
265 Besides the test suites and cases for release verification, additional testing is performed to validate
266 specific features or characteristics of the OPNFV platform.
267 These testing framework and test cases may include some specific needs; such as extended measurements,
268 additional testing stimuli, or tests simulating environmental disturbances or failures.
270 These additional testing activities provide a more complete evaluation of the OPNFV platform.
271 Some of the projects focused on these testing areas include:
277 VSPERF provides a generic and architecture agnostic vSwitch testing framework and associated tests.
278 This serves as a basis for validating the suitability of different vSwitch implementations and deployments.
284 Bottlenecks provides a framework to find system limitations and bottlenecks, providing
285 root cause isolation capabilities to facilitate system evaluation.
288 .. _`OPNFV Configuration Guide`: http://artifacts.opnfv.org/opnfvdocs/colorado/2.0/docs/configguide
289 .. _`OPNFV User Guide`: http://artifacts.opnfv.org/opnfvdocs/colorado/2.0/docs/userguide
290 .. _Dovetail project: https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/dovetail