Draxler, S

Karl, H

Kouchaksaraei, HR

Peuster, M

Tavernier, Wouter

Van Rossem, Steven

English

Manuel Peuster

Sevil Draxler

Hadi Razzaghi Kouchaksaraei

Steven v. Rossem

Wouter Tavernier

Holger Karl

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A flexible multi-pop infrastructure emulator for carrier-grade MANO systems

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

A Flexible Multi-PoP Infrastructure Emulator forCarrier-grade MANO SystemsManuel Peuster∗, Sevil Dräxler∗, Hadi Razzaghi Kouchaksaraei∗,Steven v. Rossem†, Wouter Tavernier† and Holger Karl∗∗Paderborn University: {manuel.peuster, sevil.draexler, hadi.razzaghi, holger.karl}@upb.de†Ghent University - imec: {steven.vanrossem, wouter.tavernier}@intec.ugent.beAbstract—Developing a virtualized network service does notonly involve the implementation and configuration of the networkfunctions it is composed of but also its integration and testwith management solutions that will control the service in itsproduction environment. These integration tasks require testbedsthat offer the needed network function virtualization infrastruc-ture (NFVI), like OpenStack, introducing a lot of managementand maintenance overheads. Such testbed setups become evenmore complicated when the multi point-of-presence (PoP) case,with multiple infrastructure installations, is considered.In this demo, we showcase an emulation platform that exe-cutes containerized network services in user-defined multi-PoPtopologies. The platform does not only allow network servicedevelopers to locally test their services but also to connect real-world management and orchestration solutions to the emulatedPoPs. During our interactive demonstration we focus on theintegration between the emulated infrastructure and state-of-the-art orchestration solutions like SONATA or OSM.I. INTRODUCTIONThe recent rise of the network function virtualization (NFV)concept introduced a new level of flexibility into the net-working domain by allowing fully automated network servicedeployments and runtime reconfigurations. These automatedprocesses are triggered and controlled by management andorchestration (MANO) systems which are a key entity in suchsetups [1] and have recently been the focus of many researchand open-source projects [2]–[4]. Such MANO systems donot only control the resources, e.g., the provisioning of virtualmachines in which virtual network functions (VNFs) are exe-cuted, but also the configuration and setup of the actual VNFsoftware stacks and their interconnections across multipledata centers, typically called points of presence (PoP). Thisintroduces a dependence between the MANO system and themanaged services, which has to be tested by network servicedevelopers to verify that their services play well with all candi-date MANO systems. Examples include tests of configurationmechanisms as well as the validation of scaling and placementdecisions and their effects on the network service. However,these validation tasks become very complicated and resourceconsuming, even if they could be automated in a DevOpspipeline [5], because testbed installations for each PoP andits attached virtualization infrastructure are required.In this demo, we will show how a network service developercan utilize our multi-PoP infrastructure emulation platform,called MeDICINE [6], to quickly setup NFV test environmentsfor arbitrary network services. After motivating this workby outlining the challenges of NFV development and testprocesses in Section II, we give more details about our NFVemulation platform and the used abstractions to integrate withexisting MANO systems in Section III. Finally, we describethe planned demonstration in Section IV.II. NFV SERVICE DEVELOPMENT & TESTINGThe development of NFV services involves a range ofdevelopment, testing and integration tasks. Services consistof a number of network functions, each typically developedand tested in isolated environments (unit testing). After this,network functions are combined and potentially executed inan ordered manner (service function chaining) to create theservice. This service needs again to be tested which requiresan adequate testing environment that offers reproducibility aswell as debugging and monitoring functionalities. Finally, theintegration between service, the involved functions, and theMANO system of the target platform needs to be validated.Thus, the canonical NFV development and testing processfollows a process similar to the following list of steps:1) Development of individual network functions.2) Test deployment of individual network functions on con-trolled infrastructure. This includes the deployment indifferent infrastructure setups (e.g., single-PoP vs. multi-PoP) and the use of different MANO systems.3) Development of the composed network service, includ-ing service chaining and interactions among individualfunctions of the service.4) Test deployment of the complete network service oncontrolled infrastructure. Again including different infras-tructure setups and the use of different MANO systems.Deploying these single- or multi-PoP infrastructure envi-ronments to be controlled by a range of MANO solutions inan on-demand setting can be very costly in terms of requiredhardware and operational as well as set-up costs. A quick andlow-cost network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI)and MANO system testbed emulation mechanism, as describedin step 1 to 4, is therefore extremely desirable. In previouswork [6], we presented MeDICINE as highly configurableNFVI emulator. In this demo we showcase its recent ex-tensions to support multiple MANO frameworks allowinginteroperability tests between developed network services andMANO systems. This is not possible with existing test andtroubleshooting tools [7] and can so far only be done withplatforms that are limited to execute simplified network func-tions [8] or with expensive, full-featured NFVI deployments.III. BUILDING A MULTI-POP NFVI EMULATOROur goal is to design and implement a system that al-lows a user to define and setup arbitrary, complex multi-PoPenvironments. Each PoP emulates a small data center withits independent NFVI and the attached virtual infrastructuremanager (VIM). These PoPs can then be used and controlledby real-world, carrier-grade MANO systems, like the SONATAservice platform [2] or OSM [3].A. Background: MeDICINE platformAs described in [6], MeDICINE is a Mininet-based, open-source emulation platform that allows the execution of arbi-trary application containers inside emulated PoPs connected touser-defined topologies on a single physical or virtual machine.These topologies are described with Python scripts and providethe full set of Mininet features, like use-defined delays or lossrates between the PoPs. Using MeDICINE in an NFV contextallows us to run arbitrary network functions inside emulatedmulti-PoP topologies as long as the used functions can bepackaged as containers (e.g. Docker).B. Integration conceptWe identified two different approaches to enable the easyintegration between our emulated environment and real-worldMANO systems. The first approach is to implement cus-tomized driver plugins that support our emulation platform foreach MANO system. The second approach is to add alreadystandardized interfaces to our emulation platform which canthen directly be used by off-the-shelf MANO installations.Since we want to support as much MANO solutions aspossible and keep the development overhead low, we decidedto go for the second approach. More specifically, we realized itby adding OpenStack-like interfaces to our platform, becausepractically every MANO system comes with driver plugins forthe OpenStack APIs.As illustrated in Fig. 1, our platform automatically startsOpenStack-like control interfaces for each of the emulatedPoPs which allow MANO systems to start, stop and manageVNFs. This approach has a good level of abstraction and wehave been able to implement the needed set of API endpointsrequired by the SONATA and OSM orchestrators in less than3.8k lines of Python code. Specifically, our system providesthe core functionalities of OpenStack’s Nova, Heat, Keystone,Glance, and Neutron APIs1. Even though not all of these APIsare directly required to manage VNFs, all of them are neededto let the MANO systems believe that each emulated PoP inour platform is a real OpenStack deployment.From the perspective of the MANO systems, this setuplooks like a real-world multi-VIM deployment, i.e., the MANOsystem’s southbound interfaces can connect to the OpenStack-like VIM interfaces of each emulated PoP.1https://developer.openstack.org/api-guide/quick-start/Fig. 1: Demonstration architecture in which two state-of-the-art MANO systems (SONATA [2] and OSM [3]) control mul-tiple PoPs of the virtual infrastructure layer that is emulatedby our MeDCICINE platform [6].IV. DEMONSTRATIONThe objective of the planned demo is two-fold. First, weexplain how a user can use the MeDICINE platform tospecify and emulate arbitrary multi-PoP topologies and runcontainerized applications, like VNFs, in these PoPs. Second,we showcase how a user can connect a MANO system of hischoice to the emulated infrastructure to build a full-featured,local, multi-PoP NFVI testbed. This is demonstrated by con-necting two reference MANO systems, namely the SONATAservice platform and OSM, to our platform. Finally, we willdemonstrate how a network service, consisting of multiplechained VNFs, is deployed on the emulated infrastructureusing the MANO systems mentioned above.A. Used network serviceFor the demonstration, we designed an example networkservice that acts as a content delivery network (CDN) thatwill be showcased in a video streaming context. The serviceconsists of three containerized VNFs. The first VNF of theservice is a caching proxy solution based on Squid2, the secondVNF is a layer 4 forwarding element based on Socat3 and thethird VNF is a web service based on Apache4 that acts ascontent provider. Figure 2 shows the service and how it isaccessed by users during the demo to proof that the deployedservice instance is actually running on our emulation platform.We implemented three different versions of the service usingthe HEAT template language, SONATA description format,as well as the OSM descriptor language. Using this, we2http://www.squid-cache.org3http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/4http://httpd.apache.orgFig. 2: A CDN-like demo network service consisting of threeinterconnected VNFs.demonstrate how we can deploy the same service on ourplatform using different MANO systems. We also have somealternative VNF implementations available which we can useto demonstrate descriptor modifications and re-deploymentsduring our demo.B. Demonstration stepsThe demonstration includes the following steps:1) Specification and setup of the emulated multi-PoP topol-ogy.2) Deployment and management of the demo service on ourplatform using the stock OpenStack command line clients.3) Registration of emulated PoPs to real-world NFV MANOsystems, namely SONATA and OSM.4) On-boarding, deployment, and management of the ex-ample service on the emulated infrastructure using theconnected MANO systems.5) Live interaction with the running service to validate thatit is properly deployed and functional, e.g., by streamingcontent through the service and monitoring performancemetrics, like packet counters of the running VNF.C. Visualization and monitoringThe outcome of each demonstration step will be visible onvarious graphical interfaces and dashboards as shown in Fig. 3.This is done with the help of our monitoring framework that isavailable for the MeDICINE platform. The monitoring frame-work is able to gather, export, and visualize arbitrary, user-configured metrics and offers a user-friendly way to validate ordebug the service’s functionality and resource usage. It allowsthe service developer to describe custom sets of monitoringmetrics independently of the service’s descriptor language andcan monitor any kind of service, e.g., by internally queryingthe traffic counters of each virtual interface connected to oneof the emulated PoPs.D. RequirementsThe demo can be executed either locally on a single laptoprunning the entire emulation platform or remotely on a server.It requires a power outlet for a laptop and one or two largescreens to show the dashboards and monitoring data. A stableInternet connection is only required if the remote fallbackdemonstration is used. A wall or stand to mount a posterwill help to describe the demo to the audience. There is aFig. 3: Demonstration dashboards showing VNF instancesrunning inside the emulated PoPs and the correspondingmonitoring information, like CPU, memory and network per-formance.YouTube video available that shows some parts, i.e. the OSMintegration, of the planned demo5.V. CONCLUSIONOur demonstrated system provides a novel emulation envi-ronment which lowers the barrier of testing network servicesby not requiring full-featured NFVI testbed installations (e.g.,OpenStack clusters). It is in particular useful for integrationtests between user-developed network services and real-worldMANO solutions which can be connected through OpenStack-like VIM interfaces. In addition to this, researchers can use thesystem to conduct experiments with novel MANO approachesusing many emulated PoPs. The demonstrated software is opensource and available on GitHub6.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe would like to thank our project group students who implemented someof the used interfaces. This work has been partially supported by the SONATAproject, funded by the European Commission under Grant number 671517through the Horizon 2020 and 5G-PPP programs (www.sonata-nfv.eu) andthe German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Collaborative ResearchCentre “On-The-Fly Computing” (SFB 901).REFERENCES[1] ETSI, “NFV Management and Orchestration; Report on ArchitecturalOptions,” Website, 2016, online at http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi gs/NFV-IFA/001 099/009/01.01.01 60/gs NFV-IFA009v010101p.pdf.[2] SONATA consortium, “D4.1: Orchestrator prototype,” Website, 2016,online at http://www.sonata-nfv.eu/content/d41-orchestrator-prototype.[3] ETSI OSM, “Open Source MANO: Open Source NFV Management andOrchestration (MANO) software stack aligned with ETSI NFV,” Website,2016, online at https://osm.etsi.org.[4] Frauenhofer Fokus, “OpenBaton,” Website, 2015, online at http://openbaton.github.io/.[5] H. Karl, S. Dräxler, M. Peuster, A. Galis, M. Bredel, A. Ramos, J. Martrat,M. S. Siddiqui, S. van Rossem, W. Tavernier et al., “DevOps fornetwork function virtualisation: an architectural approach,” Transactionson Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 1206–1215, 2016.[6] M. Peuster, H. Karl, and S. van Rossem, “MeDICINE: Rapid Prototypingof Production-Ready Network Services in Multi-PoP Environments,” inNetwork Function Virtualization and Software Defined Network (IEEENFV-SDN). IEEE, 2016.[7] T. Lévai, I. Pelle, F. Németh, and A. Gulyás, “EPOXIDE: a modularprototype for SDN troubleshooting,” in ACM SIGCOMM ComputerCommunication Review, vol. 45, no. 4. ACM, 2015, pp. 359–360.[8] S. Clayman, L. Mamatas, and A. Galis, “Experimenting with controloperations in software-defined infrastructures,” in NetSoft Conference andWorkshops (NetSoft). IEEE, 2016, pp. 390–396.5YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/8X2lpAbeLvM6GitHub: https://github.com/sonata-nfv/son-emu

A flexible multi-PoP infrastructure emulator for carrier-grade MANO systems

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A flexible multi-PoP infrastructure emulator for carrier-grade MANO systems

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Ghent University Academic Bibliography