OPNFV is a carrier-grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services. Goals include accelerating time to market for NFV solutions, ensuring the platform meets the industry’s needs, and enabling end user choice in specific technology components based on their use cases and deployment architectures.
Scope
Creating a strong foundation for the OPNFV baseline platform is essential in ensuring that the industry has a good basis to build on top of moving forward. OPNFV looks to realize the ETSI NFV ISG’s architectural framework by bringing together upstream software components to implement an end-to-end platform for NFV. The below diagram illustrates the ETSI NFV architecture:
OPNFV Platform Diagram
As a testing and integration project, OPNFV brings together upstream components across compute, storage and network virtualization in order create an end-to-end platform. Activities within OPNFV focus on integration of components and automated build and deployment of the integrated environment. Continuous integration and automated testing of the platform for key NFV use cases is key to ensure the platform meets NFV industry needs. Defining new requirements and features necessary to the platform and working closely with upstream communities to incorporate these capabilities within their code bases is also an important area of focus.
Brahmaputra Release
The second release of OPNFV is Brahmaputra, which is a lab-ready release focused on providing a set of testing scenarios that can be utilized and adapted by developers for developing NFV services and Virtual Network Function (VNF) applications.
The following diagram shows an architectural view of Brahmaputra. The left side of the diagram highlights upstream components in Brahmaputra along with the community lab infrastructure, where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. The right side of the diagram shows representative capabilities in the areas of integration, testing, and adding features to services and applications. These capabilities are added to OPNFV via approved OPNFV projects.
There are many new, extended testing and integration capabilities in the Brahmaputra release, as well as deployment and integration enhancements and the ability to add new carrier grade features to your services. For more information, see the OPNFV Software page.
Using Brahmaputra: Testing and Deployment Scenarios
Brahmaputra offers more choice to end-users with pre-built deployment scenarios that include more SDN controllers, installers, deployment options, and carrier-grade features. The current set of available test scenarios contribute to OPNFV’s viability as a lab that is ready for your immediate usage.
For example, you can compose your own scenario (selecting and configuring features and components relevant to the service you are creating) and take advantage of a strong OPNFV continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. The available continuous integration mechanisms provide a stable framework for deploying and testing new use cases in your own lab or across the extensive Pharos community labs.
Similarly, you can do this using one of the existing OPNFV scenarios as a starting point. Extensions to existing scenarios may be picked up and integrated into the existing sets of scenarios.
Use Cases
Virtual network functions range from mobile deployments, where mobile gateways (e.g. SGW, PGW, etc.) and related functions (e.g. MME, HLR, PCRF, etc.) are deployed as VNFs, to deployments with “virtual” customer premise equipment (CPE), tunneling gateways (e.g. VPN gateways), firewalls or application level gateways and filters (e.g. web and email traffic filters) to test and diagnostic equipment (e.g. SLA monitoring). These VNF deployments need to be easy to operate, scale, and evolve – independently from the type of VNF being deployed. OPNFV aims to create a flexible platform, which can support a set of qualities and use-cases such as the following:
The common mechanism for life-cycle management of VNFs, which include deployment, instantiation, configuration, start and stop, upgrade/downgrade and final decommissioning.
The consistent mechanism for specifying and interconnecting VNFs, VNFCs and PNFs; agnostic of the physical network infrastructure, network overlays, etc., i.e., virtual link.
The common mechanism for dynamically instantiating new VNF instances or decommissioning sufficient VNF instances to meet the current performance, scale and network bandwidth needs.
The mechanism for detecting faults and failure in the NFVI, VIM and other components of the infrastructure and recovering from those failures.
The mechanism for sourcing/sinking traffic from/to a physical network function to/from a virtual network function.
NFVI as a Service for hosting different VNF instances from different vendors on the same infrastructure
Pharos Community Labs
A key part of OPNFV is our Pharos Community Labs project as well as OPNFV bare metal lab infrastructure hosted by the Linux Foundation. Pharos is a federated NFV test lab capability that is geographically and technically diverse. It enables the deployment and testing of OPNFV builds on a variety of different hardware environments and helps ensure that OPNFV is not tied to one particular hardware architecture or vendor.
Pharos compliant labs were involved in the creation of the Arno software release, and many more are coming online every day. See more information on Pharos here: https://www.opnfv.org/developers/pharos
Upstream Projects
OPNFV integrates components from upstream projects. Within with the Arno release, the OPNFV community integrated components from upstream communities such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack, and Open vSwitch. OPNFV will continue working with these and other relevant upstream communities for future releases.
OPNFV has an “upstream first” philosophy. We do not look to fork upstream projects or create OPNFV specific versions of these projects. When, through our requirements projects or our testing activities, we discover gaps, desired features, or bugs, we will participate in the appropriate community process of the upstream organization to incorporate patches, collaborating with their communities. For more information on our upstream activities, please visit the communities page on our wiki: https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/COM
Standards Developing Organizations
The OPNFV project will also work in collaboration with Standards Developing Organizations (SDO). OPNFV has signed a high level LOI with ETSI NFV ISG to facilitate collaboration between the two organization. We also look to collaborate with other SDOs who are active in the space, such as IETF, MEF, TM Forum, and others. In some cases OPNFV participants will help identify practical experience in implementing standards and provide feedback back into standards bodies. We believe that collaboration amongst organizations will enable the industry to move forward together to meet shared goals for NFV.