By Brady Johnson (Ericsson) and Prithiv Mohan (Intel)
OPNFV recently had a chance to participate in the first ETSI NFV Plugtests, held January 23-February 3 in Madrid, Spain. As the first-ever ETSI NFV Plugtests, the goal of the event was a coming together of MANO, VNF and NFV platform (VIM & NFVi) providers to perform ETSI NFV interoperability testing among different vendors and open source providers.
Together with Prithiv from Intel, Ericsson colleagues Juanma Fernandez and Juan Vidal, we were able to represent two OPNFV pods (one indirectly OpenDaylight), which was one of four supporting open source projects, as an NFV platform. Ericsson provided a virtualized OPNFV Service Function Chaining (SFC) Colorado deployment using the Fuel installer. This deployment used an OpenDaylight (Boron) SDN controller as a Neutron back-end. Intel similarly brought in an OPNFV Colorado release environment with OpenStack Mitaka managed by an Apex installer. In Intel’s setup, OpenStack’s Neutron was used as the SDN controller.
Ericsson were pleased to report that they executed 18 successful, approved test sessions with OPNFV in just under 10 days and Intel were pleased to report 14. (It should be noted that, for a test session report to be “approved,” it needed to be performed by a MANO provider with a VNF on a particular VIM & NFVi. All three parties—the MANO, VNF and VIM & NFVI providers—must approve the report to merit successful completion.) The OPNFV test sessions run by Ericsson included five different MANO providers and 11 different VNF providers. Those run by Intel included six MANO vendors and 12 VNF vendors.
The deployments consisted of:
- OPNFV Colorado 3.0 with the Fuel installer for Ericsson. OPNFV Colorado 3.0 with the Apex installer for Intel.
- Ericsson’s deployment was a virtual deployment with one controller and three computes hosted in the Ericsson Pharos lab. Intel’s environment consisted of five nodes setup with two compute nodes and three controller nodes.
- ODL Boron SR2 was used as the Neutron backend for all networking for the Ericsson setup and OpenStack’s Neutron was used in the Intel platform.
- ODL Netvirt was the Neutron implementation used for Ericsson.
Ericsson is very happy with the outcome of the testing completed during the event, clearly highlighting and demonstrating the value of OPNFV community efforts in NFV. We are eager to engage further in future Plugtests and similar events to address additional areas we were unable to dive into during these two weeks. For example, there were two additional tests focused on specific hardware capabilities that we weren’t able to execute due to incompatibilities of our virtualized system, and we attempted to run an OPNFV SFC deployment with one more VNF but did not have the time. In the future, we will invest further into establishing a longer pre-testing phase allowing us to prepare the proper configuration, any needed workarounds, and have additional discussions with VNF vendors supporting SFC.
Intel had very successful Plugtests as well. Each test session was done with one MANO vendor and one or two VNF vendors at the same time. The MANO provider changed every day and the test sessions continued with a different set of VNF vendors. The Intel OPNFV-based environment was so stable that at one point during the busy schedule, there were four MANO solutions and five VNF providers on-boarded at the same time and running tests in parallel.
All in all, it was a successful 10 days and we’re very happy with what was accomplished. This has been a great achievement for the OPNFV project, since it demonstrates maturity of the OPNFV platform, which is now ready for complex deployments. Moreover, it is a clear demonstration that open source MANO projects are ready to integrate with OPNFV, although there is still work to be done when it comes to more advanced use cases such as SFC. Additionally, Ericsson was approached by several VNF providers who asked for help with side testing –a testament to our streamlined process.
A final thought: as these interoperability tests are complementary to OPNFV integration tests conducted during our own OPNFV Plugfests, there’s an even more seamless opportunity for OPNFV to be involved in future ETSI Plugtests.
A special thank you to the extended Intel and Ericsson teams representing OPNFV: Adrian Hoban, Jack Morgan, Trevor Cooper, Ross Brattain and Sibai Li from Intel; and Juan Vidal, Juanma Fernandez, Nikolas Hermanns, Fatih Degirmenci, Jose Lausuch, Harshad Tanna, and Ernest Bayha from Ericsson.
Stay tuned for more information on OPNFV’s evolving testing efforts.