Current Release: Jerma 10.0
Jerma culminates over six years of development effort, integration, and testing; supporting CNTT’s evolution, and advancing testing, benchmarking, and service assurance for the industry.
Overview
OPNFV Jerma is the 10th and final stand-alone release of OPNFV. The release culminates over six years of development effort, integration, and testing. The priority for OPNFV this year was to provide a technical foundation for the Cloud iNFrastructure Telco Taskforce (CNTT) — supporting its reference model, architecture, infrastructure, and conformance requirements. OPNFV developed a new release process to manage this interaction and provide quick feedback on the large number of development requirements. OPNFV now offers a test framework with key projects (Functest, VSPerf, NFVBench and Sample VNF) all able to run smoothly and quickly in any end user CI toolchain via Xtesting and XtestingCI tooling.
With Jerma, OPNFV directly supports the CNTT reference implementations (RI) and reference conformance in CNTT (RC). Three projects assisted with the OpenStack based RI1 and RC1. The Airship Installer project in Jerma now supports OVS-DPDK, SR-IOV, and VLAN trunking — all crucial for VNF use, includes enhanced security and container immutability, and enhanced logging and monitoring. The CIRV project, also pertaining to RI1, now includes support for multiple software validation, installation, pre-deployment, and post-deployment tools. It further supports hardware and software validation and systematic and customized test cases. These enhancements and more help validate the hardware and software at each key deployment checkpoint, and more. The Dovetail project furthered automation by allowing the pushing of results through a REST API integration after CVC review.
In our testing projects, VSPerf, used to characterize virtual switch performance, now includes support for K8s container networking benchmarking for multiple plugins, virtualized IxNet traffic generator, automated telemetry infrastructure deployment and advanced analysis of test and monitoring data. VSPerf also allows automatic deployment of several types of traffic generators to run tests. The benefits of these enhancements are support for both VM and container based environments, flexibility in using traffic generators including commercial systems, and the ability to perform deeper analysis of testing results. The SampleVNF project that creates VNF approximations to provide realistic loads for the NFVI layer, now provides the ability to extract test cloud configured dataplane networking benchmarks using ETSI NFV TST009 standards via automated testing. Both of these projects support testing the CNTT RA-1 dataplane performance requirements.
For Service Assurance, the Doctor project continues to make progress on the rolling maintenance use case — allowing infrastructure maintenance/upgrade with an ETSI defined interface while ensuring zero impact on the VNF running on the infrastructure. The use case relies heavily on the OpenStack Felix project. In Jerma, the Doctor project also advanced Kubernetes testing with OpenStack Fenix, enabling telco-grade infrastructure maintenance and upgrade. The Barometer project, used for monitoring of the infrastructure, made a number of enhancements including the support for collectd 5.12, DPDK 19.11, new dpdk_telemetry plugin, reference containers for CentOS 8, and improved testing.
During the Jerma release, some projects like Functest, chose to utilize the Self-Release model and a network operator, Orange, was leading those contributions. The Functest project is the primary contributor to the CNTT Reference Conformance testing. OPNFV also saw projects like Kuberef start up, and others like the ones mentioned above, expand their participants. OPNFV also hosted many LFN-Interns and Student Volunteers giving back to the community.
On January 27, 2021 OPNFV will officially merge with CNTT — forming a new project in LF Networking. We invite you to register for the launch event.