Wiki

Version: 1.0 (Nov 24, 2014)

Project Name:

Codename: Pharos

Descriptive name: Test-bed Infrastructure

Project repository:

opnfv-repo-pharos or opnfv-repo-tbd

Project Categories:

• Documentation
• Integration & Testing
• Collaborative Development

Project Description

This project proposes developing a test-bed framework for creating a federated NFV test capability that will be hosted by a number of companies in the OPNFV community. We have at least 1 volunteer party in each of Asia, Europe and US at this time. The volunteer parties will be responsible to setup, operate, and maintain these test-beds in a way that is consistent with the proposed OPNFV test-bed framework.

There are many reasons that community testbeds are important resources to the success of the OPNFV mission. Here are just to name a few (and by no means exhaustive):

• For the broader community to be able to understand, evaluate and adopt OPNFV's output (e.g. an OPNFV release), the OPNFV community needs to first collectively test OPNFV ingredients and platforms with realistic NFV use-cases by using an open, consistent, repeatable/replicatable test environment.

• While some of development, testing, benchmarking and use case work may be completed in a simple dev environment, many complex and scale cases require more substantial resources not available to many developers. Since OPNFV does not plan to own and operate such an infrastructure at this time, community hosted testbeds are necessary.

• Setup and evaluation of OPNFV technologies and platforms is a complicated process not least because of the significant integration effort required and multitude of configuration options available. A reference implementation running on a test-bed with well-documented hardware and software components, as well as configurations and integration/configuration learnings can help to significantly simplify this process for the community (and hence lower barriers to adoption).

• Open and consistent testbeds under an OPNFV governance and collaborative model are much more valuable than disjoined testbeds from individual entities.

Scope

Three work threads are proposed for developing and operating the infrastructure and will be undertaken within the Test and Performance sub-group …

1. Test-bed governance and policy
2. Reference platform hardware and software definition
3. Test-bed tooling

• First, this project is to produce a common entry web interface to community testbeds hosted by different companies. This web portal will be accessible within OPNFV wiki.

• It should document common information, status, and guides about the testbeds, including governance and policies.

• In order for the testbeds have some basic commonality and portability (to upper layer software), we will define a reference hardware configuration. We will also initially define a "bootstrap" software configuration to get started, and eventually migrate to use OPNFV release(s) coming out of Continuous Integration (CI) project.

• The basic hardware components of the initial version of the testbeds will likely include (only for illustration of scope): x86 servers of relatively recent architectures, relatively high throughput PCIe, 1G and 10G Ethernet Adaptors, local storage, and 1/10G Ethernet switches.

• The basic software components of the bootstrap version may include (only for illustration of scope): Linux OS, Qemu/KVM, OpenStack, OpenVSwitch.

• Finally, this project should also include a minimum "smoke test' set that can be run regularly to maintain basic operational status and report this status in the common wiki page.

Excluded from this project:

• Performance benchmarks
• Comprehensive functional tests
• VNF use case tests and benchmarks

Dependencies

This project has the following dependencies

• Eventually, the software we use will need to be the output of the CI project.
• We may use tools from other OPNFV projects or from other upstream projects.
• We may use commercial hardware test equipment or non-open-source test software in non-exclusive basis.

Documentation

The primary documentation is the wiki pages, including the user guide for the testbeds.

Committers and Contributors

A partial list at this moment:

• Wenjing Chu, wenjing_chu@dell.com,
• Morgan Richomme morgan.richomme@orange.com,
• Trevor Cooper, trevor.cooper@intel.com,
• C.Donley@cablelabs.com,
• erica.johnson@iol.unh.edu,
• sheng-ann.yu@ericsson.com,
• Qiao Fu, fuqiao@chinamobile.com,

Planned Deliverables

• One or more operational testbeds.
• Wiki pages as web entry for testbed users.
• A reference hardware and software configuration for replicating a testbed.
• A set of software tools for users to access the testbeds.
• Smoke test and tools for running/automating the smoke test.

Proposed Release Schedule

• Nov 26, 2014: Official project proposal submission to TSC.
• Completion of the project phase I: Q1 2015, or aligned with OPNFV Release 1.

— Wenjing Chu 2014/11/24 06:23