Early on, Intel, its partners and the OPNFV community identified Yardstick, Barometer and SampleVNF projects as the ideal environment in which to develop the NSB initiative and address this widespread industry challenge. The Networks Services Benchmarking framework was added to Yardstick to support both VNF/Network Service Characterization and NFVI Characterization and to facilitate deterministic and repeatable benchmarking.
For VNF/Network Services Characterization Yardstick integrates with the OPNFV SampleVNF project to provide tests for sample VNF workloads using traffic generators. SampleVNFs supported include:
- vFW - virtual Firewall
- CGNAPT - Carrier Grade Network Address and port Translation
- vACL - virtual Access Control List
Traffic generator supported include:
- Trex
- Ixia IxNetwork/IxLoad
Using these test cases users can test how OPNFV performs under more sophisticated simulated VNF workloads and understand how to test new VNFs. With the NSB framework, Yardstick users can perform advanced VNF testing to evaluate both scale-up and scale-out performance. To evaluate performance, Yardstick gathers Key Performance Indicators (KPI) collected with the OPNFV Barometer project.
For NFVI, characterization support was added for the PROX DPDK-based traffic generator and VNF workload simulator. Using PROX, the user can quickly and flexibly test different simulated VNF workloads. The same tool can be used to generate traffic and to simulate workloads efficiently.
The Yardstick project includes a new graphical user interface (GUI), and can now test end-to-end network services including stress testing via Bottlenecks, Kubernetes scenarios. QTIP, Storperf, VSPerf and Functest projects have all continued to evolve with new features, capabilities, and test cases as well.
The Yardstick project gathers KPIs from the system statistics collection daemon collectd, enabled through the OPNFV Barometer project. A new GUI, based on the grafana, makes it easy to view KPI’s, launch characterization activities and view reports. The new interface also simplifies the process for users to generate test suites, analyze test results and performance and configure testing end-to-end.
The expanded Yardstick REST API now supports greater programmability and more automation of testing, enabling “Testing as a Service.”
Our goal is to help the industry accelerate the adoption of NFVI, VNFs, software defined networks (SDN) and other transformational network technologies. Intel will continue its work with its ecosystem to evolve its Network Services Benchmarking initiative and make strategic contributions to the open source community.
The Euphrates announcement is the culmination of great collaborative effort, but it’s only a beginning. We need more participation from the industry to make these investments as valuable as possible for a diverse set of use cases.
Join Us at OPNFV Euphrates Plugfest at Intel Jones Farm Campus – Dec 4-8, 2017
Intel will host the OPNFV Euphrates Plugfest at its Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro, Oregon from December 4-8, 2017. OPNFV members and non-members are welcome to attend. For more details, visit:
https://www.opnfv.org/event/opnfv-euphrates-plugfest
You can learn more about the OPNFV by visiting https://www.opnfv.org
