opnfv

With even more mature cloud native integration, better testing, additional features, and expanded CI/CD infrastructure, OPNFV Fraser builds ecosystem bridge to cloud providers

San Francisco — May 1, 2018 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through reference platform development, integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of the sixth OPNFV platform release, OPNFV Fraser. Making the mission of OPNFV more operationally relevant, Fraser advances the state of NFV around cloud native applications and new upstream project integration while continuing end user support as they deploy and test virtualized networks.

By increasing support for cloud native applications and providing access to readily deployed NFV infrastructure on demand, OPNFV provides the platform and tooling required by developers with whom end users are actively collaborating to validate, integrate, onboard, and test NFVI, VIM, VNFs, and network services. With a new level of maturity that brings the industry even closer to true cloud native integration that can be leveraged by cloud providers, Fraser has deepened its testing capabilities around functional, performance, stress, and benchmark testing. The release also brings new carrier-grade features around monitoring, service assurance, networking, and dataplane acceleration. With these updates, Fraser strengthens the project’s position as the nexus point for collaboration across networking ecosystems.

“Since inception, OPNFV has been the place for industry collaboration with upstream communities, which has grown even more with the Fraser release,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, Community and Ecosystem Development, The Linux Foundation. “With more mature cloud native integration and expanded testing and collaboration, OPNFV delivers the tools needed for end users to validate and test new network services.”

Key updates in OPNFV Fraser include:

• Advancing the support for cloud native NFV. Fraser expanded cloud native NFV capabilities in nine different projects, more than doubled the number of supported Kubernetes-based scenarios, deployed two containerized VNFs, and integrated additional cloud native technologies from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) relating to service mesh (Istio/Envoy), logging (fluentd), tracing (opentracing with Jaeger), monitoring (Prometheus), and package management (gRPC). These updates move the cloud native capabilities from basic container orchestration to include operational needs for cloud native applications. Additionally, the FastDataStacks project takes advantage of FD.io work to incorporate the VPP dataplane into Kubernetes networking capabilities to enable cloud native network-centric services.
• More mature testing. OPNFV continues to focus on the real-world deployment needs of service providers by expanding test case coverage and scope. Testing projects in Fraser see a robust increase in test cases. Functest, the OPNFV functional testing project, now permits use of its framework with other open source projects such as ONAP. This avoids duplication, reduces VM size, and accelerates the creation of additional test cases. Functest also added test cases to cover Kubernetes and Clover and made it easier and faster to run functional tests. Also in support of real-world needs, performance test projects extended the Day 0 performance testing to long-running performance testing as Day N operational issues become more real for service providers.
• Continuous Integration (CI) updates enable increased community hardware utilization, which in turns speeds up the testing process. Fraser includes the latest versions of upstream projects and advanced dynamic CI with the introduction of metadata descriptor specifications for Scenarios, PODs, and installers that will make hardware allocation for scenarios dynamic and automated. The XCI cross-community project made additional cloud-native strides by initiating CI/CD integration work with the CNCF Cloud CI project.
• New carrier-grade features are added, specifically in the areas of monitoring, service assurance, networking, and dataplane acceleration. Specific new features include:
  • • The Doctor project, in conjunction with OpenStack, whose collaboration was instrumental in achieving this milestone, introduced an infrastructure maintenance use case for zero VNF downtime. Similarly, Barometer continued to expand the monitored items list and plugin support. The Calipso project added support for Kubernetes and physical/physical-virtual switch connections across heterogeneous environments.
  • The SFC, SDNVPN, FastDataStack, and Parser projects added new features around networking and dataplane acceleration.
  • The IPv6 project now supports clustering, simplifying network configuration, and is exploring IPv6 container networking.

Supporting Operator Deployments

Orange and China Mobile have used OPNFV continuous integration (CI) pipeline and testing projects to create an NFV onboarding framework within their organizations. Orange uses OPNFV for NFVI and VIM validation, VNF onboarding and validation, and network service onboarding. China Mobile uses OPNFV for their Telecom Integrated Cloud (TIC) to continuously integrate, onboard and test NFVI, VIM and VNFs; and full network service onboarding and testing based on OPNFV is on their roadmap.

“Orange sees OPNFV as the right vehicle to create and end-to-end solution to certify VNFs, NFVI reference architecture, and integration with ONAP,” said Jehanne Savi, Executive Leader of the AII-IP and On-demand Networks Programmes, Orange.

What’s Next

The ​fifth ​OPNFV ​Plugfest will be co-located with ETSI at their location in Sophia Antipolis, France on June 4-8, 2018. Testing will include ETSI test cases and will focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. Both OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend.

The recently announced OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) had four graduates in its first iteration (Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, ZTE) and is recruiting more vendors and network operators to participate in the next version of the test suite and program.

The virtual central office (VCO) demo is expanding into residential services with a virtualized Mobile Network use case, including vRAN for the LTE RAN as well as vEPC for a minimum viable mobile access network configuration. The demo will be featured at the Open Networking Summit Europe event, September 25-27 in Amsterdam.

The seventh OPNFV release, Gambia, due out end-of-year or early 2019, will include a slew of new projects. Areas of focus are expected to featureinclude: C-RAN (cloud radio area network), AUTO (ONAP automated OPNFV), eEdge cloud, and Capstone (certificate management service), among others.

More information about OPNFV Fraser is available at https://www.opnfv.org/software/downloads.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

The Third ETSI NFV Plugtests Event and OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will take place at ETSI from 29 May to 8 June

Sophia Antipolis, France, 21 March 2018: ETSI and OPNFV will co-locate their next community testing events in Sophia Antipolis, France. The third ETSI NFV Plugtests™ event will be held between 29 May and 8 June 2018, and the OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will be held from 4 to 8 June. ETSI and OPNFV look forward to increasing collaboration across the standards and open source ecosystem by co-locating their testing activities. OPNFV is an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing.

“Effective interoperability is the goal of any standards activity, and ETSI NFV adopted an approach oriented towards actually exercising and demonstrating interoperability from its start in 2012, evolving from Proofs of Concepts to Plugtests activities,” says Diego Lopez, chairman of ETSI ISG NFV. “This event is a new opportunity to strengthen the current cooperation with relevant open-source communities in the NFV landscape.”

The third NFV Plugtests event will concentrate on building and demonstrating complex Network Services that combine virtual network functions from different VNF providers and developers, while testing interoperability with MANO solutions across different platforms and sites. It will also exercise advanced NFV features like network and service automation. The sessions will demonstrate how multivendor combinations of NFV components can address 5G and zero-touch network and service management use cases, and will expand the scope of NFV API testing to help progress the work on NFV conformance testing.

OPNFV plugfests focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. The event provides a platform for the community to work with hardware from both open source and commercial vendors and try out various combinations of components. During the last OPNFV plugfest, December 4-8, 2017, the focus was on the OPNFV Euphrates release and included discussion on contributing specific test cases for the combined ETSI/OPNFV plugfest in June. Read the full Plugfest Report here. The focus of the next plugfest will be on the Fraser release as well as developer design sessions for topics related to testing, CI/CD, and future releases. Participation is open to any interested developers.

“We are pleased to be co-locating our next OPNFV plugfest with ETSI,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, community and ecosystem development, The Linux Foundation. “Acceleration of NFV interoperability is a shared goal among both organizations and overlapping communities; co-locating the events will facilitate greater collaboration of resources and more consistency within deployments.”

Open source communities such as ETSI Open Source MANO, Open Baton, OpenStack and OPNFV are actively involved in the ETSI Plugtests’ activities through their membership and implementations. Collaboration among standards organizations, open source communities, and testing events enable better cross-project communication and harmonization.

The two-week ETSI event is part of the ongoing ETSI NFV Plugtests Programme. The programme takes advantage of the ETSI Hub for Interoperability and Validation (HIVE) to inter-connect worldwide participating organisations (more than 45 currently), engaging in different validation tests. It provides the foundation for the direct interaction among function developers with interoperability as the essential goal.

About ETSI

ETSI provides members with an open, inclusive and collaborative environment to support the timely development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services across all sectors of industry and society. We are a not-for-profit organization with more than 800 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 66 countries and five continents. Members comprise a diversified pool of large and small private companies, research entities, academia, government and public organizations. ETSI is one of only three bodies officially recognized by the EU as a European Standards Organization (ESO).

For more information please visit: www.etsi.org

About OPNFV

OPNFV Project a Series of LF Projects, LLC (“OPNFV”) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. For more information, please visit http://www.opnfv.org. OPNFV is part of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN), an effort to support, coordination and provide resources across open source communities advancing open networking. For more information, please visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/networking.

Contacts:

ETSI: Claire Boyer

Mob: +33 (0)6 87 60 84 40

Email: claire.boyer@etsi.org

OPNFV/The Linux Foundation: Jill Lovato

+01 (503) 703 8268

Email: jlovato@linuxfoundation.org

• Collaboration across open hardware and software to enable full open source stacks
• Expanded integration and test of OCP hardware with OPNFV
• Harmonization across disaggregated hardware with Switch Network Operating Systems

SAN JOSE, Calif. (OCP Summit), March 20, 2018—The Linux Foundation and the Open Compute Project (OCP), a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure, today announced a joint collaboration to further the development of software- and hardware-based open source networking. The organizations will work together to create stronger integration and testing, new open networking features, more scalability, a reduction in CAPEX/OPEX, greater harmonization with switch network operating systems, and increased interoperability for network functions virtualization (NFV) network transformation.

Virtualization of network functions and the resulting disaggregation of hardware and software have created interest in open source at both layers. OCP provides an open source option for the hardware layer, and The Linux Foundation’s OPNFV project integrates OCP along with other open source software projects into relevant NFV reference architectures. Given this alignment, OCP and OPNFV already have been collaborating on activities such as plugfests and joint demos. Now they have committed to expanded collaborative efforts.

“The Open Compute Project has been quite successful at disaggregating traditional IT gear and creating vanity free ingredients. It is now time to carefully select the ideal hardware and software ingredients to re-integrate into efficient solutions,” said Bill Carter, chief technology office, OCP.

“The work being done by OPNFV is a key piece of that re-integration: bringing together the best open source software projects together with the best choices of open source hardware, to enable NFV. By integrating and testing a set of reference architectures on top of efficient, scalable cloud hardware, OPNFV is removing all the roadblocks to NFV adoption and transformation of the telecom infrastructure.”

“It’s exciting to see the principles of open source software development come to hardware, and OCP has already made a substantial contribution to some Linux Foundation project plugfests and demos,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, networking, The Linux Foundation. “We see OCP as an integral partner as we explore new opportunities for NFV deployments, performance, features, and footprint. Global network operators agree and ranked OCP very high on a list of the most important projects for OPNFV in a recent survey. We look forward to continued and intensified collaboration across ecosystems.”

OCP, LF Networking projects, and other ecosystem partners will be onsite at ONS North America, March 26-29 in Los Angeles. The event will include six tracks bringing networking and orchestration innovations together with a focus on the convergence of business (CIO/CTO/architects) and technical (DevOps) communities.  More detailed information on how OCP and OPNFV are collaborating is available in a new OPNFV + Open Compute Project Solution Brief, available here.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

About Open Compute Project
The Open Compute Project Foundation is a 501(c)(6) organization which was founded in 2011 by Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace. Its mission is to apply the benefits of open source to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center and beyond. Learn more at www.opencompute.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.