1. Installing vswitchperf

1.1. Supported Operating Systems

  • CentOS 7
  • Fedora 20
  • Fedora 21
  • Fedora 22
  • Ubuntu 14.04

1.2. Supported vSwitches

The vSwitch must support Open Flow 1.3 or greater.

  • OVS (built from source).
  • OVS with DPDK (built from source).

1.3. Supported Hypervisors

  • Qemu version 2.3.

1.4. Available VNFs

A simple VNF that forwards traffic through a VM, using:

  • DPDK testpmd
  • Linux Brigde
  • custom l2fwd module

The official VM image is called vloop-vnf and it is available for free download at OPNFV website.

1.4.1. vloop-vnf changelog:

1.5. Other Requirements

The test suite requires Python 3.3 and relies on a number of other packages. These need to be installed for the test suite to function.

Installation of required packages, preparation of Python 3 virtual environment and compilation of OVS, DPDK and QEMU is performed by script systems/build_base_machine.sh. It should be executed under user account, which will be used for vsperf execution.

Please Note: Password-less sudo access must be configured for given user account before script is executed.

Execution of installation script:

$ cd systems
$ ./build_base_machine.sh

Please Note: you don’t need to go into any of the systems subdirectories, simply run the top level build_base_machine.sh, your OS will be detected automatically.

Script build_base_machine.sh will install all the vsperf dependencies in terms of system packages, Python 3.x and required Python modules. In case of CentOS 7 it will install Python 3.3 from an additional repository provided by Software Collections (a link). Installation script will also use virtualenv to create a vsperf virtual environment, which is isolated from the default Python environment. This environment will reside in a directory called vsperfenv in $HOME.

You will need to activate the virtual environment every time you start a new shell session. Its activation is specific to your OS:

1.5.1. CentOS 7

$ scl enable python33 bash
$ cd $HOME/vsperfenv
$ source bin/activate

1.5.2. Fedora and Ubuntu

$ cd $HOME/vsperfenv
$ source bin/activate

1.5.3. Working Behind a Proxy

If you’re behind a proxy, you’ll likely want to configure this before running any of the above. For example:

export http_proxy=proxy.mycompany.com:123
export https_proxy=proxy.mycompany.com:123