How The OPNFV Functest Team Tests The Clearwater vIMS Deployment Using Cloudify
By now, you are probably very familiar with the OPNFV Project from the Linux Foundation. If not, the quick and dirty explanation is that OPNFV is basically an open source platform that brings together various NFV components and tests them in order to help carriers and vendors release virtual network functions (VNFs) in a quick and reliable manner.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of building an open source tool is that you are often pleasantly surprised to find out that someone has just grabbed your code and used it for their project. In this case, the Functest (functional testing) team at OPNFV, specifically Valentin Boucher and Morgan Richomme from Orange Labs, contacted us to let us know about their OPNFV vIMS test-case. Functest intention is to test and verify the OPNFV Platform functionality covering the VIM and NFVI components. In looking for an orchestrator and VNF Manager, they found Cloudify fit the bill.
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Functest for Arno and Brahmaputra
Into the first OPNFV release named “Arno”, Functest focused on NFVI,VIM and SDN integration testing. Functest test suites are run to validate every OPNFV platform deployment.
The second OPNFV release named “Brahmaputra” includes some new test-cases to better check the OPNFV platform capacity to host complex VNF. The vIMS has been selected for various reasons: it is a complex VNF with various components requiring some configuration for communication between the different VMs and it requires a basic workflow to set up all the VNF components. Thankfully, MetaSwitch open sourced their vIMS solution (Clearwater) that is very well documented and using cloud-ready software architecture.
Why Cloudify
To manage a complex VNF, it’s necessary to use an orchestrator and we selected Cloudify because it fits all the vIMS test-case requirements (open source solution, workflow, TOSCA modeling, good integration with OpenStack components, openness with plugins…).
Clearwater vIMS Test Cases With Cloudify
The various vIMS test-cases are:
- Environment preparation (create user/tenant, choose flavor, Upload OS Images..)
- Orchestrator deployment (create Cloudify manager router, network and VM..)
- VNF deployment with Cloudify (create 7 VM, install and configure software ..)
- VNF tests (create some users, launch more than 100 tests)
- Push result (push the deployment duration and tests results)
All the steps are automated and integrated into the OPNFV Continuous Integration and more than 1,000 test cases have been run between November 2015 and April 2016 (every day, the redeployment of a OPNFV platform includes the vIMS test case alongside other test cases). All collected results allow for detecting some tricky problems in terms of the installer, hardware or SDN controller used by the platform.
This test-case only uses deployment/undeployment workflow in Cloudify because it’s just a VNF functional testing. In the future release, it will be possible to test the VNF performance because all the tools and workflows (monitoring, scaling, healing) are already built into, or possible (software upgrade), with Cloudify. A next step will target a distributed VNF located on two platforms for geographical redundancy.
Developed by a telecom operator using well documented open source VNF and orchestrator, this vIMS test-case is also a perfect example of how operators can embrace open source solutions to build their future agile networks. Orange invites other telecom operators to contribute other VNF test-cases to enhance the OPNFV platform.