The audience will build and deploy an OPNFV Yardstick in a Docker container and run it against a live OpenStack installation. They will then run it again, against an EPA-enabled version to see the differences. Aspects of Yardstick, NFV usage, EPA and upcoming developments will be discussed. About the speaker: Jim Chamings is a Sr. Software Engineer at Intel, working in the Datacenter Scale Engineering team. His focus is on enabling Cloud and SDN/NFV developers to get the maximum value out of their data centers.

1. Intel® Confidential — INTERNAL USE ONLY
Use EPA for NFV & Test
with
OPNVF* Yardstick*
Jim Chamings, Intel DRD/Datacenter Scale Engineering
Out of the Box Network Developers Meetup, 9/20/2017

2. 2
Legal Notices and Disclaimers
This presentation is for informational purposes only. INTEL MAKES NO WARRANTIES,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Intel technologies’ features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require
enabled hardware, software or service activation. Performance varies depending on system
configuration. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at intel.com.
This sample source code is released under the Intel Sample Source Code License Agreement.
Intel and the Intel logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Copyright © 2017, Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

3. 3
Today’s Agenda
• Introductions, Mine and Yours
• Technology Preview: OpenStack* EPA, OPNFV*, Yardstick*, NSB
• Demonstrations
• Building Yardstick
• Yardstick ping
• Reconfigure for EPA
• Yardstick ping test repeat
• Summary / Q&A

4. Introductions

5. 5
Let’s Get to Know One Another
Me
• Sr. Software Engineer, 21+ years with Intel
• Not at all new to Cloud, but quite new to NFV
You?

6. Technology preview
OpenStack* EPA, OPNFV*, & Yardstick*

7. 7
OpenStack* Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA)
• What is it? It’s a whole raft of code that’s been contributed (primarily to Nova*)
to enable cloud operators to direct workloads to specific compute node
capabilities.
• Some of the capabilities exposed through EPA:
• CPU features
• PCI passthrough
• Non-uniform Memory Access (NUMA) awareness
• Open vSwitch* (OVS*)-DPDK
• Many others

8. 8
Open Platform for Network Function Virtualization*
• What Is It? A Linux Foundation* project aimed at creating reference platforms
for NFV by providing common integration, deployment, and testing
frameworks.
• (What it’s not...)
• Currently the runnable portion is a set of four possible OpenStack* (or
Kubernetes*) distributions, called ‘Installers’.
• We’ll be using one called ‘Apex*’ today.
• It’s also a set of test frameworks, of which Yardstick* is one.
• Release code names: Brahamaputra, Colorado, Danube, Euphrates

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OPNFV* Yardstick*
• What Is It? A test framework, sample test cases, and test stimuli aimed at allowing
operators to verify infrastructure compliance when running VNF applications.
• Most test cases are ‘decomposed’ into the basics that VNFs depend on: network
throughput/latency tests, storage performance tests, CPUs, and so on.
• You’ll see familiar tools like ping, iperf, and netstat, as well as more complicated
test suites (and VNFs as well).
• Yardstick can work against any heat-enabled OpenStack* Cloud (not just OPNFV).
• Yardstick tests can also be written to work against preconfigured nodes—no cloud
required (current Network Services Benchmark is like this).

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Network Services Benchmarking
• NSB is a plugin for Yardstick*.
• "GOAL: Extend Yardstick to perform real-world VNFs and NFVi
characterization and benchmarking with repeatable and deterministic
methods.”
– http://docs.opnfv.org/en/stable-danube/submodules/yardstick/docs/testing/user/userguide/13-nsb-overview.html#abstract
• As of this writing, the test cases that have been added to NSB work with
predefined bare metal nodes.
• OpenStack* / Heat support is planned for the near-ish future.
• NSB development offers the promise that this demo’s title conveys.

11. Demonstration

12. The demo environment
12

13. 13

14. 14
Building OPNFV-Apex
• There are four possible OPNFV* installers: Compass*, Apex*, Fuel*, and
Juju OPNFV Infrastructure Deployer(JOID)*.
• Apex offers a functional all-in-one virtual deployment that utilizes nested
KVM, which is why I chose it for this session.
• Currently deploys OpenStack* Newton release (10/2016).
• Instructions link:
• http://docs.opnfv.org/en/stable-danube/submodules/apex/docs/release/
installation/index.html#apex-installation

15. 15
Building OPNFV-Apex (cont’d.)
• All installers of OPNFV* offer ‘scenarios’. The scenarios are named in a
specific format:
• {virtual infrastructure manager}-{SDN}-{NFV technology}-{HA/No HA}
• Examples:
• os-odl_l2-fdio-ha = Openstack, OpenDayLight w/Layer-2 support,
include FD.io support, use High Availability deployment.
• os-nosdn-kvm-noha = Openstack, no SDN support, use KVM, no High
Availability (single controller).
• This is the scenario used in the demo environment.

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Building Yardstick*
• Running a Docker* container is the easiest way, by far!
• Configure it with --privileged so that report tools (InfluxDB*, Grafana*) can be
generated automatically.
• Configure to pass through OpenStack* credentials.
• Environment setup will build Cirros*, Ubuntu*, and Yardstick test images, and
upload them into the test cloud.

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Yardstick* Simple Ping
• Located in /home/opnfv/repos/yardstick/samples/ping.yaml
• Simple test scenario, generates heat template with two VMs, sets up a ping
between them.
• The ‘runner’ is the part of the framework that actually executes the test.
• Generates data which can be transformed into an HTML report (or fed to
dashboard application).

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Reconfigure for EPA
• The demo was configured with two identical compute node VMs. I altered one
of them to use OVS* with DPDK instead of the base deployment of OVS.
• In doing so, and by connecting the ‘server’ up to OpenStack* in the proper
fashion, I enabled the capability to schedule to it using EPA code.
• Specifically, the use of the ‘hw:mem_page_size=2MB’ extra key, applied to
a new flavor for launching VMs, ensures that VMs are launched with the
huge pages they need to access vhostuser interfaces on the DPDK-enabled
host.
• The actual details of doing this reconfiguration work are a bit beyond the
scope of this presentation and demo.

19. 19
Reconfigure for EPA – Flavor Detail

20. 20
Repeat Yardstick* Ping Test
• Reconfigure the .yaml file that defines the test to use the new flavor instead of
the old.
• Redirects test VMs to the new compute host.
• In my test environment, this resulted in a drop from 1-2ms to sub-1ms latency.
• Note that interfaces are being created as ‘dpdkvhostuser’ on the enabled
host, and how traffic is being directed via the EPA code.

21. Summary / Q&A

22. 22
Summary: OpenStack* EPA testing with Yardstick*
• Testing out OPNFV* and Yardstick is relatively simple in a virtualized
environment, and worth a spin to see if it’s useful for NFV operators and
developers.
• Yardstick can also be deployed against existing orchestrators and nodes, to
test live environments.
• Test cases are growing rapidly, and soon basic VNFs will be easy to use as
well.
• Network Services Benchmarking will offer a comprehensive VNF
benchmarking framework in time. It’s worth getting familiar with it now.

23. Q&A
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