The OPNFV test bed project “Pharos” is a federated NFV testing infrastructure of community labs around the world designed for hosting continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and testing of the OPNFV platform. On a nightly basis, Pharos builds 30+ scenarios and deploys them in an automated fashion across the globe on multiple hardware platforms. Pharos was instrumental for deployment and testing of all the OPNFV releases. In the context of a particular release, Pharos creates and tears down thousands of OpenStack data centers integrated with multiple NFV components and performs thousands of lines of automated test code against them. Since the start of OPNFV, the Pharos test lab infrastructure has grown to 16 member company labs spanning North America, Europe and Asia. A federated community enables significant scaling for OPNFV as it continues to grow.
The goal of the Pharos project is to facilitate collaborative testing across scenarios that conform to a baseline OPNFV specification (compute, network and storage requirements). This provides developers with substantial resources for early testing within realistic NFV environments via an open, consistent, repeatable test domain. It also helps ensure OPNFV applicability across architectures, environments and vendors through a collection of diverse labs and a broad range of hardware. The diversity of perspectives across developers, users and vendors participating in these labs make the project critical to the success of the OPNFV platform. This leads directly to more robust, interoperable releases of OPNFV.
OPNFV Pharos Lab-as-a-Service
Pharos Lab-as-a-service (LaaS) allows developers to reserve hardware resources for specific periods of time as well as access to automatically pre-provisioned OPNFV stacks, thus speeding up software development.
OPNFV XCI Sandbox
OPNFV also has an XCI Sandbox where developers and testers can create a virtual environment with the latest upstream code. The environment ranges from 1 to 6 VMs and is therefore much smaller than a full-blown Pharos POD.
Edge Pharos Effort
With edge computing around the corner, the original Pharos footprint is proving to be a bit too heavy. To address this, the Edge Cloud project is working on a reduced Pharos specification specifically for edge environments.
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