Recap of Fourth OPNFV Plugfest

Spirent participated in the fourth OPNFV Plugfest hosted at the Intel campus near Portland, OR December 4-9, 2017. With an enthusiastic participation of 104 people from 32 organizations, the event was a success and marks the ever-growing potential of NFV technology. Plugfest highlights included testing containers, VNF onboarding, cross community CI (XCI), impact of noisy neighbors on performance, service function chaining (SFC), Dovetail, Functest, NFVbench and Storperf. Advantech, Nokia and Intel provided on-site dedicated hardware for the Plugfest and attendees had access to 14 PODs where they could collaborate and run tests.

Spirent NFV test solutions – CloudStress, TestCenter Virtual and Metrics Service were running on multiple Intel PODs and used for running Noisy Neighbor and NFVi benchmarking tests.

Noisy Neighbor Impact Mitigation

Spirent and Intel team using the VSPERF project demonstrated implications of Last Level Cache (LLC) usage in an NFVi environment. Spirent CloudStress acted as a noisy neighbor to the test VNF and was used to generate huge CPU and memory load on the VSPERF system. While generating the noise, the impact on last-level cache (LLC) and the performance degradation of the VSPERF system were observed. After that, noisy neighbor impact was mitigated using Intel Resource Management Daemon (RMD) and Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) improving the efficiency LLC usage and overall system performance. The test highlighted the significance of cache optimizations needed in an NFVi environment along with the existing considerations of CPU and memory optimizations.

NFVi Benchmarking

Spirent and Wind River Titanium Cloud team tested their NFVi testbed with Spirent TestCenter Virtual and Spirent Metrics Service. The testing included VNF instantiation, running up to 10G of traffic, collecting NFVi Analytics and termination of a VNF. The focus of testcases was to benchmark the existing infrastructure to ensure successful VNF onboarding and achieve line rate forwarding performance.

Along with being an active contributor to open source communities like OPNFV, Spirent is leading the thought leadership of accelerating NFV deployments by developing test solutions that range from NFVi benchmarking, VNF lifecycle management to collecting NFVi analytics.

Results and Lessons from the Fourth OPNFV Plugfest (December 2017)