NFV-VITAL and ENVI

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) brings a cloud service automation paradigm to demand-driven elastic flexing of infrastructure resources. However, it is essential to characterize the impact of hardware and virtualization options on the virtual network function (VNF) performance and load on underlying infrastructure.

We present a VNF characterization case study with an open-source VNF platform, Clearwater. We demonstrate that VNF characterization is vital for optimizing VNF performance as well as efficient utilization of infrastructure resources. We use the lessons learned from this case study to design and implement a VNF characterization framework, NFV-VITAL, to automatically instantiate VNF based on user preferences and available resources. We demonstrate how NFV-VITAL can automatically identify optimal configurations under different workloads with Clearwater and the Snort and Suricata intrusion detection systems.

We also develop ENVI for resource flexing.

NFV-VITAL System diagrams

Fig. 1 shows the OpenStack Icehouse infrastructure and fig. 2 shows how Clearwater is deployed on our OpenStack testbed.
Fig. 1: Testbed infrastructure Fig. 2: Clearwater deployed on testbed

Clearwater case study plots

Click here for more workload and CPU plots of Clearwater VNF case study including scaling out, scaling up and hybrid scaling.

NFV-VITAL sample user input files

Example 1 and example 2 show the user input files for the two demonstrations in section III.B of the paper.
Click here for more detailed explanations on user input options. 

    ############################################################  
    # Copyright 2015 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. #  
    # Author: Lianjie Cao, lianjie.cao@hpe.com                 #  
    ############################################################  
    # Deployment specifications 
    vnf_name: Clearwater
    components: 
      - bono:
        flavors: [cw1.small, cw1.medium, cw1.large] 
      - sprout: 
        flavors: [cw1.small, cw1.medium, cw1.large] 
      - homestead: 
        flavors: [cw1.small, cw1.medium, cw1.large] 

    deploy:
        script: /home/nfv-vital/cw/cw-install.sh 
    server:
        number: 1
        knobs:
            pinning: yes 
            sr-iov: no 
    mode:
        sizes: no
        search: directed
        resource:
            vcpu: 6 
            mem: no 
            net: no 
        target-load: no
        scale: up

    # Workload specifications 
    generator: /home/nfv-vital/cw/run-sipp.sh
    rates: 
      custom: no
      range: [200, 700]
      increase: 50
    repeat: 10
    stop: 0.9
    
    ############################################################  
    # Copyright 2015 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. #  
    # Author: Lianjie Cao, lianjie.cao@hpe.com                 #  
    ############################################################  
    # Deployment specifications 
    vnf_name: Snort
    components:
      - snort:
        flavors: [cw1.small, cw1.medium, cw1.large] 
    deploy:
        script: /home/nfv-vital/snort-install.sh
    server:
        number: 1
        knobs:
            pinning: no
            sr-iov: no
    mode:
        sizes: 
          - snort:
            - cw1.small: 1
          - snort: 
            - cw1.medium: 1
          - snort: 
            - cw1.large: 1
        search: no
        resource:
            vcpu: no
            mem: no
            net: no
        target-load: no
        scale: no

    # Workload specifications 
    generator: /home/nfv-vital/ids/run-hping3.sh
    rates: 
      custom: [30000, 50000, 100000, 125000, 150000, 175000]
      range: no
      increase: no
    repeat: 10
    stop: no
Example 1: Clearwater demonstration Example 2: Snort demonstration

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