Learn how operators and service providers can validate SDN, virtualized network functions, NFV infrastructure, and network services to speed up commercial deployments.

1. Accelerating SDN and NFV
Deployments with Spirent
Malathi Malla

2. 2Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Vertically integrated
Closed, proprietary
Slow innovation
Traditional
Networks

3. 3Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
 Protocol flood / plethora
 Open source communities
 App portfolio – video, voice, security
 Interoperability
 Performance
Across virtual and cloud infrastructure
Infinite Complexity of Testing

4. 4Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
SDN and NFV: A Secular Trend

5. 5Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Software-
Defined
Networking
Agility.
Manageability.
Programmability.
 New business models and
revenue opportunities
 Minimize complexity and
network management
 Lower capital and operational
expenses

6. 6Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Software-defined Networking
 Separation of forwarding and control planes
 A standard, vendor-agnostic interface to program
network hardware
 Centralized control plane or NOS opened via an
API to application developers
 Virtualization where multiple NOSs can control
slice of the same hardware device
 SDN approaches
 Underlay (OpenFlow, BGP, PCE-P)
 Overlay (VXLAN, MPLS, Segment Routing)

7. 8Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
SDN Protocols for Internet and CarrierE Network Programmability

8. 9Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
SDN Deployment with OpenFlow
 Defined by Open Networking Foundation
 OpenFlow is an open API that provides a
common instruction set for interacting
with packet-forwarding hardware
 It is a centralized Controller that
separates Data Plane from Control Plane
 A single Controller interacts with many
switches and allows for quick, dynamic
changes as network needs evolve
OpenFlow Model
Switch Switch Switch
Data Plane
Control Plane
OF Config
Protocol
OF
Protocol
Applications
APIs

9. 10Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent and Open Networking Foundation
 ONF member since founding year
 Testing and Leadership Council – member
 Testing and Interoperability Working Group
 Vice Chair Benchmarking Group
 Test Case Contributions
 Conformance Tests and Benchmarking
 AppFest and SDN Solutions Showcase
 Validating OpenFlow networks with Spirent
 OpenFlow Controller Emulation
 OpenFlow Switch Emulation

10. 11Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
OpenFlow Controller Emulation
 High Scale and Performance
 1M+ flows and twenty Controllers per port
 Thousands of Switches per Controller
 OpenFlow Feature Rich
 Selectable OpenFlow versions – 1.0 and 1.3
 Multi Table, Master / Slave, Group Table, Metering
 OpenFlow Channel
 Secure via TLS v1.2 RFC 5246
 Government approved – proven security fixes

11. 12Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
OpenFlow Switch Emulation
 Test OpenFlow Controllers at scale, by
emulating various topologies, real
Switches with real links
 Validate if the OpenFlow Controller can
maintain connection to its network
under heavy load
 Validate the OpenFlow Controller adds
all Flows properly
 Find the limits of your OpenFlow
Controller before you are asked by your
customer

12. 13Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
BGP Emulation
 Validate the BGP Flowspec protocol in PE
routers and ensure DDoS mitigation by
using BGP Flowspec
 Emulate BGP Flowspec speaker, the
originator of DDoS traffic and terminating
webserver
 Validate your DUT’s ability to speak BGP
Flowspec, program ACLs based on
flowspec rules, and mitigate DDoS attacks
in accordance with flowspec rules

13. 14Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
PCEP Emulation
 Ability to emulate PCE Controller and
PCE Client (PCC) for functional,
scalability, performance and
interoperability testing of PCE protocol
 Support for Stateful PCE and PCE
initiated LSPs
 Verify PCE path selection and path
optimization within constraints and on
network failure
 Support for high-availability test
scenario emulating primary and backup
PCE Controller

14. 15Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
VXLAN Emulation
 Create high-scale, complex topologies
to validate both physical and virtual
VXLAN-enabled DUTs
 Validate the control plane scalability of
VXLAN devices by emulating various
host protocols
 Generate VXLAN encapsulated traffic
to validate physical VXLAN device
forwarding performance

15. 16Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
EVPN Emulation
 ƒƒQuickly assess the performance and
scalability of your EVPN solution
 ƒƒEasy-to-use wizard to build, configure,
setup complex topologies
 ƒƒComprehensive support for most data
encapsulations MPLS, VXLAN and MAC-
in-MAC
 Support on all Ethernet interfaces from
1Gig to 100Gig (with LAG), and Virtual
and includes full automation
 Support for Single-Active and All-Active
Multi-homing with ESI extended
community

16. 17Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Segment Routing Emulation
 Control plane topology setup (mix of
global, local & service segments)
 Load balancing with any-cast segment
and ECMP
 Traffic isolation when using VPNs
 Inter-working of SR-capable and non-
SR capable nodes
 Maximum number of PEs per VRF or
number of VRFs per PE device for
VPNs

17. 18Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
MPLS Emulation
 Build any size MPLS, VPLS or GMPLS
network emulation with integrated
Access, Routing, or CarrierE protocols
 Stateful or state-less Unicast or
Multicast Layer-2, IPv4, or IPv6 traffic
with Topology Emulation
 Choose from more than 25 emulated
MPLS topologies, including MPLS LDP
LSP, Martini or Komplella-style PWE3,
LDP, BGP Signaled VPLS, etc.

18. 19Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Simplify SDN deployments with visibility and control
Spirent
3D Topology
Suite
 360⁰ navigation with context-
aware network controls
 Graphical visualization of (one-
to-many) Switches attached to
the Controller
 Statistical view of Switches,
Flows, and Interfaces

19. 20Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent TestCenter 3D Topology Suite
Simplify IT with dynamic visibility and control
 Visualize Software-defined network topology under test
 3D, interactive view of OpenFlow topology
 Graphical visualization of (one-to-many) Switches attached to the Controller
 Statistical view of Switch, Flow, and Interfaces
 Centralize management and administration
 360⁰ navigation with context-aware network controls
 Add / modify flows across topology
 Advanced flow management
 Increase productivity with rapid troubleshooting
 Flow-based troubleshooting in real-time
 Views and filters for rapid anomaly detection and resolution
 Eliminate hours of debug time by identifying areas of congestion

20. 21Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

21. 22Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Network
Functions
Virtualization
Elasticity.
Flexibility.
Scalability.
 Shorter service delivery cycles
and quicker time-to-value
 Greater service agility and
scalability
 Lower capital and operational
expenses

22. 23Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Source: The 2015 Guide to SDN and NFV, Jan 2015
30%of network professionals have
concerns about end-to-end
provisioning.
24%feel immaturity of current
products and technologies.
13%unsure on how to evolve from
a POC to broad deployment.

23. 24Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent and NFV Thought Leadership
 ETSI NFV Phase 2 requirements
 Active contributors to PER and REL Working groups
 NFV test methodologies at NFV Plenary #5
 Collaboration with SPs for NFV PoCs
 Completed PoCs with Orange and BT/Intel for vBNG,
vCDN and vIPSec
 vRouter DDoS PoC with Brocade, Intel and AT&T
showcased recently
 vRouter HQoS PoC underway
 Key contributor to OPNFV partner
ecosystem

24. 25Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
BT
Telefónica
Brocade
Dell
Intel
Spirent
PoC #18. VNF Router Performance with
Hierarchical Quality of Service Functionality
Source: ETSI NFV Wiki

25. 26Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Bringing it all together with Virtualization
Spirent TestCenter Virtual optimizes the
performance of new cloud-enabled network services
and innovations NFV and SDN.

26. 27Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent TestCenter Virtual
 Layer 2–7 test and measurement
capabilities for legacy and emerging
protocols
 Test performance, availability, security
and scale of virtualized infrastructure
 Supports best-in-class cloud platforms:
OpenStack, VMware vCloud, Cloudstack,
Amazon Web Services, etc.
 Test cases are 100% portable from
hardware to virtual with real time analysis
and reporting

27. 28Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent’s Virtual and Cloud Solutions
Full Virtualized Stack Benchmarking and Testing Product Suites
Choke Points
“How many app instances
can I spin up?”
“Can my network scale across
VXLAN or VLANs?”
“Should I use
SSD or Spinning Disk?”
“Can my VNFs handle
Internet Route Reflection?”
“Do multiple VMs contend for
storage performance?”
“How many flows
can I support?”
“Does my orchestrator
scale across multiple tenants?”
“What is the service impact
of VM migration?”

28. 29Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Holistic Testing of Virtual and Cloud Infrastructure
Management & OrchestrationPerformance & Benchmarking Security & Reliability
Single VM to large scale
service chains deployed
across server clusters
Functional test and
instantiation time
Auto-scale validation
Ensure five 9’s availability
while securing for the
inevitable attack

29. 30Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Performance and Benchmarking
 Performance benchmarking of VNFs,
hypervisors and COTS hardware
 Portability and interoperability
 Performance isolation
 On-demand scale testing
 Chaos creation
vRR (DUT)
Internet
STCv PE
STCv PE
250 PEs on 5 STC VMs
520K routes import
520K routes
250 x 520K routes
COTS server
QEMU
20+ cores

30. 31Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Traffic Sweep Test: Benchmark the Forwarding Plane
performance of the VNF under test
Performance and Benchmarking

31. 32Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Control Plane: Benchmark the Control Plane scale and
performance of VNF under test
Performance and Benchmarking

32. 33Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
On-demand Scale: End-to-end traffic testing between nodes in
a multi-tenant cloud/datacenter
Performance and Benchmarking

33. 34Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
HyperScale Test Solution
 Validate NFV infrastructure from small to
massive virtual scale
 Layer 2-7 testing capabilities for legacy
and emerging SDN protocols
 Measure the impact of overlay/underlay
on application performance
 Rapid deployment by orchestrating
thousands of test VMs
 Scalable architecture with 1 to Million test
ports
 Support for multiple hypervisors including
ESXi, KVM, OpenStack, etc.

34. 35Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Management and Orchestration
 Simulate Orchestration policy scenarios
 Add 10 VMs if Memory load >70% for 3 mins
 Add 5 VMs if CPU load > 60% for 2 mins
 Delete 10 VMs if Memory load < 20%
 Test infrastructure performance and functionality pre, post and during auto-scale
 Custom enterprise / event scenarios to scale up or down
 For e.g. increase aggregate data rate per user to 5Gbps to trigger orchestration policy to add 50 VMs for
vGW

35. 36Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Functional test and instantiation time
Management and Orchestration

36. 37Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Auto-scale Validation: Successful completion of auto-scaling and the maintenance of
customer SLAs both during and after the completion of auto-scaling
Management and Orchestration

37. 38Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Security and Reliability
 Service continuity
 Fail-over convergence time
 Ensuring reliability during VM Migration
 Testing security for resources shared
across VNFs
 DDoS and Malware Preparedness STCv hosts
STCv PE
vCPE vCPE
VM Migration
COTS
server
Spirent TestCenter Virtual allows autoscale triggering and
QoE assessment during and after VM migration

38. 39Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

39. 41Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Common API & RESTful API
Windows Application Automation Web Applications & Testing Methodologies

40. 42Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
Spirent Virtual Benchmarking
The proven expertise and practical guidance needed for success
Develop
Build and automate detailed
architecture designs to help
accelerate your SDN and
NFV deployments
Deploy
Match complex testing
and service assurance
requirements with industry-
leading experts
Design
Create key test
methodologies necessary
to validate your virtual and
cloud infrastructure

41. 43Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
 Partner with Labs and experts to validate Spirent
TestCenter solutions
 Leverage best practices and years of
implementation experience
 Develop comprehensive set of test cases to help
manage the change process and achieve
successful deployments
SDN Methodologies
Flow Table Capacity, Flow Add Rate, Flow Forwarding Rate,
Controller Convergence, Flow Failover / Convergence
NFV Methodologies
Forwarding Performance of Virtual NFV DPI Device, VNF Fail-over
Convergence, VM Auto Scaling for VNFs, VNF Migration
Spirent Virtual Benchmarking

42. 44Spirent Communications PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL
© Spirent Communications, Inc. All of the company names and/or brand names and/or product names and/or logos referred to in this document, in particular the name “Spirent” and its logo
device, are either registered trademarks or trademarks pending registration in accordance with relevant national laws. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice.
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