OPNFV’s first Plugfest was held at CableLabs’ facility in Louisville, CO. This event, which focused on deployment and integration of OPNFV as well as Virtual Network Function (VNF) applications, was open to both OPNFV members and non-members.
A key goal of the Plugfest was to fortify OPNFV’s already unique testing projects and infrastructure (functional and performance) across new use cases from OPNFV members and other interested parties. Forty one participants from nineteen organizations–including three non-members–from around the world attended. They brought their key NFV use cases and the technologies needed to bring them to fruition. Many commented that the in-person collaboration was a major benefit.
OPNFV began eighteen months ago as an effort to ensure that open source projects such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight and others can be integrated into a carrier-grade environment that fully supports the performance and availability requirements of service provider networks.
Accordingly, OPNFV, along with CableLabs and Kyrio, hosted the plugfest to help establish testing criteria and find testing solutions to ensure NFV interoperability.
Mitchell Ashley, President and General Manager of Kyrio said, “Kyrio was founded by CableLabs to bring innovations and expertise to the market. Our experienced engineers are thought leaders in NFV. We congratulate OPNFV on its inaugural plugfest! It supports our mission to guide the community in virtualizing network services.”
The Plugfest used the test functionality first methodology and then measured results accordingly. The Functest (function testing) and Yardstick (system measurement) projects were heavily represented, along with the the Storperf (storage performance) and CPerf (controller performance) projects. In particular, the Cperf project is doing extensive SDN controller integration on various installers.
Additionally, all of the installer groups (Apex, JOID, Fuel and Compass) were represented and members extensively used these installers on different platforms (including on-site community labs that were generously provided by Huawei and Intel).
The Plugfest focused on the installation of NFVI and of VNFs (such as vIMS and vEPC) on multiple hardware platforms using multiple installers. In many instances, these combinations were attempted for the first time, and with OPNFV’s testing infrastructure in place, new VNF were benchmarked much more quickly than would otherwise be possible.
In addition to all the real-time interop testing of NFV infrastructure and applications, the Plugfest included several well-attended and valuable breakout sessions on OpenDaylight, the Functest and Yardstick testing projects, and a session on the entire OPNFV testing ecosystem. Many of the lessons from these sessions were immediately applied in the lab. All lessons from the entire Plugfest will be fed back into OPNFV Certification & Compliance Committee efforts.
As we look to the future, we hope to expand future Plugfests to multiple geographic locations. This will allow OPNFV to test our multisite applications. We will also concentrate on new use cases made possible by the Colorado release. As with this Plugfest, OPNFV will continue to reach out to other communities to get a broader spectrum of users involved in NFV application development.
About the author of this post
Tetsuya NakamuraTetsuya Nakamura is a Principal Systems Architect at CableLabs and member of the OPNFV Board of Directors.