User Space Accelarated OVS scenario: os-odl_l3-ovs-no Overview and Description

Scenario: “OpenStack - ovs-nfv” (apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-no) is a scenario developed as part of the ovsnfv OPNFV project.

1. Scenario: “OpenStack - ovs-nfv”

Scenario: apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha

“apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha” is a scenario developed as part of the OVS for NFV OPNFV project. The main components of the “apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha” scenario are:

  • APEX (TripleO) installer (please also see APEX installer documentation)
  • Openstack (in HA configuration)
  • OVS/DPDK Open vSwitch with DPDK data plane virtual forwarder for tenant networking
  • ODL Open Daylight service running on a single controller
  • One or more compute hosts or nodes

2. Introduction

NFV and virtualized high performance applications, such as video processing, require Open vSwitch to be accelerated with a fast data plane solution that provides both carrier grade forwarding performance, scalability and open extensibility.

A key component of any NFV solution is the virtual forwarder, which should consist of soft switch that includes an accelerated data plane component. For this, any virtual switch should make use of hardware accelerators and optimized cache operation to be run in user space.

The apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha scenario provides use-cases for deployment of NFV nodes instantiated by an Openstack orchestration system on OVS/DPDK enabled compute nodes with Open Daylight controller service.

A deployment of the “apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha” scenario consists of 3 or more servers:

  • 1 Jumphost hosting the APEX installer - running the Undercloud
  • 1 Controlhost, which runs the Overcloud, Openstack services,

and Open Daylight service. * 1 or more Computehosts or nodes

_images/ovs4nfv.png

Tenant networking leverages Open vSwitch accelerated with a fast user space data path such as DPDK. Open VSwitch (OVS) with the Linux kernel module data path is used for all other connectivity, such as connectivity to public networking “the Internet” (i.e. br-ex) is performed via non-accelerated OVS with Linux kernel data path.

2.1. Features of the scenario

Main features of the “apex-os-ovs-nosdn-ha” scenario:

  • Automated installation using the APEX installer
  • Accelerated tenant networking using OVS/DPDK as the forwarder
  • VXLAN l3 tenant network support with accelerated DPDK ports.

2.2. Networking in this scenario using OVS with accelerated User space IO.

The apex-os-odl_l3-ovs-ha scenario combines components from three open source projects: OpenStack, Open vSwitch and DPDK. To make accelerated networking available for this scenario Open vSwitch is bound via its netdev interface with DPDK user space accelerated capability.

3. Scenario Configuration

Simply deploy this scenario by using the os-odl_l3-ovs-ha.yaml deploy settings file.

4. Validated deployment environments

The “os-odl_l3-ovs-ha” scenario has been deployed and tested on the following sets of hardware:

  • virtual deployments only
  • Not yet validated on UCS hardware

5. Limitations, Issues and Workarounds

  • _APEX-415 br-phy dpdk interfaces are not brought up by os-net-config

6. References