opnfv

OPNFV has made great progress since we started the organization in September 2014. As a community, the OPNFV project represents the first time open software developers, architects and standards professionals from over 55+ companies are collaborating to create an open framework for NFV platforms. The first release of OPNFV Arno in June and the Arno SR1 in September are great first steps in having a common build with some basic Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment for an NFV platform consisting of Openstack, OpenDaylight and Linux operating system on an Intel platform. This integration allows OPNFV to evaluate the NFV platforms and develop further capabilities.

Trying to shepherd an entire industry to work together and create an open NFV platform in this fast-evolving market is pretty daunting. But one thing became clear to me due to my involvement in AT&T’s software-centric network transformation – the networking industry has been very inefficient by solving the same problems again and again in different silos. These problems are operationalizing the instantiation and lifecycle to support an application/service model, which is the competitive edge for each service provider. Our operational challenges with SDN and virtualization are even more similar for the service provider and enterprise end-users. We are all using essentially the same NFVi platforms – compute, storage and networking in a “data center”/cloud environment.

There are a lot of open source projects appearing monthly and the platforms used are also evolving (e.g. containers). But each of these open source projects trying to optimize in their own space is necessary, yet not completely sufficient for NFVi platform users.

OPNFV is the only public forum with a broad community where the industry can pull together the components of the platform(s) to see if they work together. It is also an incubation environment to try out new software features and/or hardware components. We are already doing this now, except within our own corporate silos. Think about the power of open communities – can you imagine how much faster the industry will move if we come together to eliminate the interoperability differences among the various platform components?

It’s clear what the use cases should be to drive this integration: Day 0 of instantiating a virtual application with its networking and then the lifecycle of the virtual application within its networking. Automated performance testing with common traffic profiles against common benchmarks to get to the stress points in the NFVi platform are also critical to flush out.

We need more user input – enterprise and service providers – on these use cases as well as test resources to validate the platform(s) built. So, I encourage the end users and suppliers to join in the OPNFV requiremets, collaborative development and integration testing of the NFV platform.

Learn more on how to get involved with OPNFV.

About the author of this post

Margaret Chiosi, AT&T
Margaret Chiosi, Distinguished Network Architect AT&T Labs, has been involved in data networking for 30+ years. Margaret’s current focus is on implementing AT&T’s User Defined Network Cloud (UDNC) which is based on SDN and Virtualization building blocks. She has led large organizations responsible from concept through development and deployment of emerging global network services, development of data networking equipment, and strategic direction for data services and products. Margaret was one of the key members in the creation of the ETSI ISG – Network Virtualization Forum as well as the Linux Foundation Open Platform for NFV, OPNFV.

While much of the OPNFV community is engaged on the next milestone release, Brahmaputra, a team of developers has been hard at work making iterative updates and improvements to our first release, Arno. After dedicated work and collaboration, today we’re proud to announce the availability of OPNFV Arno SR1!

SR1 was designed to address known issues in the initial release for incremental stability and improved predictability. Specifically, this includes the enablement of virtual deployments complementing the bare-metal deployment, as well as component upgrades/bug fixes (e.g. full plug-in support for OpenDaylight in Fuel).

Arno SR1 also delivers deployment environment enhancements, such as:

• Harmonized network configuration, which alleviates the need for network reconfiguration between runs of different installers on the same hardware
• Simplified network configurations which simplifies deployments in locations with access restrictions
• Simplified deployments on de/re-commissioned hardware (including clean-up scripts, etc.)
• Enhanced configurations such as VM resources, floating IPs, etc.

Hear from the developers themselves on what’s new in Arno SR1:

Tim Rozet of Red Hat on Foreman/Quickstack:

“For Arno SR1 we have worked on fixing bugs and adding features that make the installation/deployment process of OPNFV more flexible and more reliable.  We gained a lot of feedback from OPNFV users for the Arno release and realized a lot of users wanted to try OPNFV, but did not have the hardware setup of 5 or 6 servers to do so.

To address this, we focused on adding a lot of support for virtualized deployments with minimal hardware requirements so that more users would be able to simply deploy and try out OPNFV on their laptops.

In addition to these features, other fixes have gone in with respect to deployments as well as migrating OpenDaylight from Helium SR3 to SR4, so users should experience a more stable OPNFV environment with Arno SR1.”

Morgan Richomme of Orange and Jose Lausuch of Ericsson on Testing:

“In SR1, we did not integrate new test cases but instead consolidated the four suites of tests already  integrated in Arno. We ensured that no regression occurred despite strong refactoring on the installer side. The automation of the tests has also been enhanced.

In preparation for Brahmaputra, we were able to automatically run the functional tests on the same POD (same hardware) with the two installers; this task required some integration work that should contribute to a better interoperability and a better user experience moving forward.

Additional preparation for Brahmaputra includes integrating the experimental mechanism of test result collection for one of the test cases, which will be generalized in Brahmaputra. It should help the community to build a testing dashboard and also reflect the influence of hardware on functional testing.”

The work done on SR1 of Arno improves the foundation upon which our future releases will be built. Kudos and deep thanks to the technical team behind this release!

More technical details about what’s included are available here:

• Arno SR1 Release Notes: Fuel
• Arno SR1 Release Notes: Foreman

We are gearing up for our inaugural OPNFV Summit happening November 9-12 in Burlingame, CA. After reviewing an astounding 131 submissions, we are pleased to announced our final agenda that includes over 65 technical tracks including a focus on business and use cases, as well as hands-on sessions and tutorials.

We start the week with the OPNFV Design Summit, which gives our developer community the opportunity to come together and collaborate face-to-face on the upcoming Brahmaputra release, conduct project breakout sessions and organic meetups. Our friends from the OpenDataPlane project and OpenDaylight Project will also host tracks at the Design Summit, which can be added to any OPNFV Summit registration at no additional cost.

Our main conference is divided into tracks and session groups that highlight a number of key focus areas for the project. These provide a focused way to collect talks, panels, and tutorials related to a particular area and will enable the community to hear a range of perspectives from service providers, developers, and other community members on a given topic.

Schedule Overview & Highlights:

• Introduction to OPNFV Technical Track covering the Nature of OPNFV (Technology, Status & Evolution) and Community
• An OPNFV in Depth Technical Track reviewing Security, SFC and Hands-on Deployment
• A Looking Outward Technical Track covering SDN and Standards and Fora
• The Looking Ahead and Getting Real Technical Track with sessions on Futures and Testing
• An OPNFV Qualities Technical Track investigating Telco Grade Requirements and Efficient Forwarding
• A Business & Use Case track including user stories and use cases from Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Cisco, Akamai and a panel of cable operators moderated by CableLabs

Previously announced keynotes include:Voice of the Customer Keynote Panel featuring:

• • Jacob Loveless, CEO of Lucera
  • Hal Stern, Executive Director of Advanced Technology and IT Planning at Merck
  • Bikash Koley, Principal Architect & Director, Network Architecture and Engineering at Google
  • Alan Blackburn, VP Architecture & Design for AT&T
  • Philippe Lucas, SVP, Standardisation, Orange
  • Moderated by Ulf Ewaldsson, CTO of Ericsson
• Sandra Rivera, VP, Data Center Group and General Manager of Intel’s Network Platforms Group, Intel; OPNFV Marketing Chair
• Dr. Prodip Sen, CTO of the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Business Unit, HP. OPNFV Chair
• Strategic Technology Upstream Panel featuring:
  • Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation
  • Neela Jacques, Executive Director of the OpenDaylight Project
  • Pere Monclus, CTO of Plumgrid
  • Brandon Phillips, CTO of CoreOS
  • Reynold Xin, Co-Founder of Databricks
  • Moderated by Peter Jarich of Current Analysis
• Chris Wright, Technical Director of SDN, Red Hat
• Heather Kirksey, Director of the OPNFV Project

Given the high number and caliber of entries, it was an incredibly tough process for our committee to whittle it down to just 65. We are very excited for this inaugural event that is bringing together the end users, developers, networking industry and open source communities to advance the development and adoption of an open source NFV platform. Thank you to everyone who submitted — it’s each and every one of you who keep us going and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have such an awesome line-up planned for our very first Summit!

Access the full agenda here and go here to register now — only US$299 through October 15th!

Thank you to our Sponsors, inlcuding HP, Intel and RedHat. See here for a full list of all event sponsors:  http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/opnfv-summit/sponsors

Marc Cohn, OpenDaylight board director and SVP of marketing for ClearPath Networks,  just posted a great summary of the most recent ETSI NFV ISG meeting to SDxCentral, entitled NFV Insider #11: Collaboration (and More Collaboration). Held in close collaboration with OpenDaylight Summit and MEF which were also happening in Silicon Valley that week, key discussion topics included NFV Phase 3 (2016 and beyond), which is “aimed toward establishing an open ecosystem as NFV is deployed.”

Hear more on Marc’s insider perspectives of the evolution and challenges of NFV and how the industry–operators, vendors, open source projects –can capitalize on NFV ISG’s progress. Check out  the full post on SDxCentral or on the ETSI NFV ISG Blog.

Our community is transitioning from the Arno release—where we constrained release activities to include only five projects—to our Brahmaputra release, where we may have more than thirty projects participating! This last week, the OPNFV community gathered at the OpenDaylight Summit for the first coordinated Developer Summit following our inaugural release, Arno. The focus of our community at the event was fittingly shared between collaboration with the OpenDaylight community and establishing our release plans for the next OPNFV release, Brahmaputra.

The OPNFV project in it’s essence collaborates and works with our upstream source communities to bring new and needed technologies to the industry, and we try to facilitate that by co-locating our events with other important upstream communities. While collaboration with the OpenDaylight community was top-of-mind, we were fortunate to schedule a combined session with OPNFV, OpenDaylight and representatives from the ETSI NFV ISG. We are grateful to the OpenDaylight community, similarly to the OpenStack community, for being receptive to having the OPNFV community co-locate our activities at their respective summits.

As expected, the focus of collaboration last week was highly network-centric and the OPNFV community benefited greatly from the wealth of networking expertise accessible at the OpenDaylight Summit. It was satisfying to participate in and observe discussions between the groups covering topics from scale and resilience, through protocol and overlay technologies, to policy and topology of virtual networks. As a user community of OpenDaylight, intent on exposing the values provided by the controller platform, OPNFV looks forward to seeing the seeds sown during these days together grow to fruition for future releases.

For OPNFV, the balance between working with open source communities and SDO’s is a challenge we face on a daily basis. Having the opportunity to participate in a joint session with a delegation from the ETSI NFV ISG while at the OpenDaylight Summit provided an in-person touch point across these domains. The team from ETSI NFV ISG raised a number of key use cases around deployment and lifecycle management of SDN controllers in the context of infrastructure and there was a good chance to converge on the testing activities across groups.

Brahmaputra planning, which is top of mind for our community today, provides the next major challenge for OPNFV and a clear priority for us during the summit. Debra Scott, our OPNFV release manager, led a number of sessions and one-on-one discussions with the community and project leaders to establish a foundation for our Brahmaputra release. While this may sound like business as usual, the challenge is immense.

A key takeaway from the event was that our community is really coming to terms with working through the process of taking concept to an upstream development community; then integrating, validating and leveraging the results to deliver cloud platform features. To have established such an understanding across the community in such a short time and with so few iterations speaks to the clarity of vision and intent across OPNFV.

I fully expect Brahmaputra to provide the first demonstration of our ability to work effectively with our upstream communities. And with the growing number of upstream-focused activities across OPNFV, there will be no shortage of features available in our “C” release.

About the author of this post

Chris Price
Chris leads open source industry collaboration for Ericsson in the areas of NFV, Cloud & SDN from the CTO’s office in Sweden and is an active member of the technical steering comitee’s of the OpenDaylight and OPNFV Projects.  Chris’ experiences include leading Ericssons’ IP&Broadband network architecture and standardization teams with a rich history in development of systems and technology in the areas of network management, policy control and user service management, user session control plane solutions, and DPI technologies.

Last November, we started a project—codenamed ‘Pharos’—to develop a test-bed framework for creating a federated NFV test capability, hosted by OPNFV member companies from across the community. Nine months later, we’re very excited about the participation so far, with 10 existing test-bed labs spanning North America, Europe and Asia and even more in the works planned by vendors, system integrators and service providers. Companies like Orange, who just opened the first two OPNFV test-bed labs in Europe, have created community access for evaluating real-world OPNFV environments. Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, China Mobile and Dell are also hosting labs which are helping to develop a federated OPNFV test-bed capability that is geographically and technically diverse.

To make this happen, we needed to develop a baseline specification for an OPNFV “compliant” test environment along with tools, processes and documentation to support integration, testing and collaborative development projects with needed infrastructure and tooling.Pharos provides a consistent view of test-bed infrastructures and their capabilities to facilitate developer/project access. Other artifacts include libraries of workloads, test-tools, best practices, etc. And in addition to the community-hosted labs, the Linux Foundation hosts an OPNFV infrastructure that is used primarily for Continuous Integration (CI), Build and Release Deployment/testing. After using the community labs for early development, the Linux Foundation infrastructure was used for deploying and testing the Arno release.

Why invest in a community test-bed lab?

These test-bed labs have become a valuable resource to our developers, providing a platform for early testing of integrated OPNFV ingredients within realistic NFV environments via an open, consistent, repeatable test domain. And while some developing can be done in virtual or more simplistic environments, many features require substantial resources that may not be available to many developers. These community-accessible test-beds allow for a range of scenarios across varying community needs.

Another advantage the labs provide is simplification– setup and evaluation of OPNFV technologies and platforms is a complicated process with significant a integration effort and a multitude of configuration decisions. Reference implementations running on a test-bed with well-documented hardware and software configurations and integration/configuration learnings help lower barriers for adoption by the community.

Additionally, Pharos enables us the community to test across different hardware platforms, architectures and environments to ensure that OPNFV really is a multi-hardware platform.

Vision

Moving forward, these community labs will be connected to CI infrastructure for continuous deployment and testing in diverse, multi-vendor environments. We’re developing common test-bed tools and an infrastructure manager for configuring a variety of test-bed deployments tools and methods.

Now that Arno has been released, the community is looking towards the next iteration, Brahmaputra. To make these labs even more resourceful, we’ll be developing automated deployment and testing capabilities, making improvements to documentation for developers, making specifications for virtual environments so developers can start experimenting without access to expensive infrastructures and expanding the scale of test environments. We’re also in the process of developing centralized reporting and anlytics with dashboards and a reservation system.

To learn more about the Pharos test-bed community labs project—and to stay up to date on the latest developments—visit the OPNFV wiki page.

About the author of this post

Trevor Cooper
Trevor Cooper has over 20 years of experience developing and deploying new technology solutions
in Networking, Telecoms and Healthcare markets. He has lived in US, Canada, UK and South Africa (where he grew up). He has worked extensively with multi-disciplinary and dispersed teams developing mission critical hardware and software. His current role at Intel is Solutions Architect working on Software Defined Networking initiatives. He also leads an Open Source group in OPNFV and represents Intel in the ETSI NFV Test and Open Source Working Group.