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OPNFV Hunter Delivers Test Tools, CI/CD Framework to Enable Common NFVI for Verifying VNFs

By Announcements, Popular

Latest release of open source NFV platform brings enhanced cross-community collaboration, integration, and testing capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO, May 14, 2019 –  LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects, today announced the availability of OPNFV “Hunter,” the platform’s eighth release. Hunter advances OPNFV’s system level integration, deployment, and testing to collaboratively build a common industry Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI) that will reduce Communication Service Provider (CSP) and Virtual Network Function (VNF) vendor efforts to verify VNFs against different NFVI platforms.

Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) is a project and community that facilitates a common NFVI, continuous integration (CI) with upstream projects, stand-alone testing toolsets, and a compliance and verification program for industry-wide testing and integration to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.  

“The latest OPNFV release sets the stage for a real turning point in the maturity of the platform,” said Heather Kirksey, vice president, Community & Ecosystem Development, the Linux Foundation. “With continued evolution in areas of testing, verification, and CI/CD, OPNFV is on its way to enable a common NFVI stack that will meet the needs of operators. We are working  in collaboration with both global operators as well as the GSMA, and I am incredibly excited to see the community work to provide the resources needed to accelerate network transformation across the ecosystem.”

Cross-Community Collaboration, Integration, and Testing

Continued cross-community collaboration makes OPNFV the natural home for the development of a common NFVI specification/reference implementation to dramatically reduce CSP and VNF vendor efforts in verifying VNFs against different NFVI platforms. This significantly enhances the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) by extending the testing of VNFs against a common NFVI (independent of management and orchestration (MANO)) layer – offering a brand new path to commercialization.

OPNFV now also offers a test framework, Xtesting, that assembles dispersed test cases to accelerate CI/CD adoption and can be used to test non-OPNFV components as well. The effort eases building of a CI/CD toolchain for NFV stack components in addition to NFVI/VIM from initial tests to full end-to-end service testing.

Additional enhancements were made to test and CI tools, which see across-the-board improvements in test coverage and scope through core OPNFV testing projects like Functest, Yardstick, Bottlenecks, VSPerf, and NFVBench. OPNFV also continues to collaborate closely with upstream communities with notable developments around C-RAN, hardware acceleration, edge computing, and cloud native NFV.

During the Hunter cycle, OVP experienced continued growth and scope expansion to include VNF verification for ONAP, as well as introduction of the new Verified Labs program for third-party testing. Lenovo has just completed verification of their first project bringing the total number of companies in the program to eight and the number of products to 11. A list of verified products can be seen on the OVP NFVI portal here: https://nfvi-verified.lfnetworking.org/#/.

Overall, OPNFV  Hunter’s testing and integration capabilities, compliance and verification program, CI/CD capabilities, cloud native network functions, best practice guidelines, and the seasoned OPNFV community working to deliver a common NFVI for the industry help to accelerate open network transformation across the ecosystem.

More details on OPNFV Hunter are available at this link.

To learn about OVP, visit https://www.lfnetworking.org/ovp/.

Looking Ahead

OPNFV and other LFN projects will be onsite at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon Europe in Barcelona, May 20-23, 2019, Cloud Native Network Services Day on June 20th. Join us to learn how LFN projects enable cloud native network functions (CNFs) and integrate across the container landscape. More information about the event, including registration, full agenda, and details on the Mini Summit, are available here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/calendar/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/.

Additionally, the next LFN Developer Design Forum (DDF) + Plugfest will be held June 11-14 in Stockholm, Sweden. The event fosters collaboration both within and across the various technical communities under the LFN umbrella and will include an ONAP DDF + OPNFVPlugfest.

The ninth OPNFV Release, Iruya, is due in the fall.

Supporting Comments

“I am proud of our latest OPNFV Hunter release,” said Bin Hu, Chairman of theTechnical Steering Committee, OPNFV. “It is a significant milestone in OPNFV’s renewed focus on addressing our end users’ needs, evaluating cutting-edge technologies from various open source communities, and better preparing the community to provide the industry with a Common Telco NFVi and supporting VNF testing and certification. We are better equipped than ever before to help our stakeholders in industry improve business agility, accelerate time-to-market and thus reduce TCO in their respective business domains. I really appreciate everyone that has been working to make this happen.”

“Network virtualization has dramatically modified our architectures and processes,” said Christian Gacon, vice president, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure, Orange. “The ecosystem has never been so volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. As a consequence, more automation and powerful testing tools like Functest, a collection of state-of- the- art virtual infrastructure test suites, including automatic VNF testing, are required. Involved in OPNFV since the first release, Orange is now leading the code contributions through Functest and, more recently, Xtesting which is a simple framework to assemble sparse test cases and to accelerate the adoption of CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) Integration best practices. They are currently used internally both to consolidate our end- to- end networking testing strategy, and to help our skill transformation. They fill the gap between our historical mission to build solutions on highly deterministic systems and our capabilities to build on-demand networks.”

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

# # #

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

The Linux Foundation Introduces Open Source Networking Days to Foster Local Collaboration

By Announcements, Popular

With the support of open source networking community members and users, The Linux Foundation brings day-long open networking events to sites across the globe

San Francisco—October 2, 2017—The Linux Foundation today announced Open Source Networking Days (OSN Days), a series of free regional events hosted and organized by local open source networking communities and The Linux Foundation members and projects including ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, DPDK, FD.io, PNDA, and more. Designed to foster innovation across the entire open source networking ecosystem, the inaugural OSN Days will take place in Paris, Milan, Stockholm, London, Tel Aviv, and Japan from October 9-19.

“We are pleased to be working with industry-leading partners — from developers to service providers to vendors — to collaboratively create solutions to accelerate open network transformation,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking and Orchestration, The Linux Foundation. “OSN Days create a wonderful opportunity for both network users and developers to learn how various open source initiatives fit together to advance and change the face of network orchestration and solutions.”

Each free day-long event will begin with a plenary session presented by site hosts and speakers from The Linux Foundation on the state of the industry and how projects across the open networking stack integrate. Additionally, the events will feature technical sessions, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops presented by community experts on the state of the industry and business opportunities enabled by network transformation such as 5G and IoT. Attendee participation and collaboration will be encouraged, with the goal of deepening knowledge of open source networking and setting the stage for continued collaboration in each region.

OSN Days are made possible by the generous support of our site hosts and sponsors, including: Amdocs, Atos, Cloudify, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Orange, Red Hat, SUSE, and Vodafone. More information, including registration and site-specific details, is available here: https://sites.google.com/linuxfoundation.org/osndays/home and here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/audience/introducing-linux-foundations-open-source-networking-days/.

Supporting Quotes From Site Hosts
Ericsson (Stockholm)
Mats Karlsson, Head of portfolio & architecture, digital services, at Ericsson says: “Ericsson is strongly promoting several open source initiatives in the Orchestration, SDN, NFV, and Cloud technology areas, thus accelerating innovation and industry adoption of new technologies as part of our overall vision for 5G. As part of Ericsson’s collaboration and deep involvement in many open source projects such as ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, and FD.io, we are organizing and hosting the Open Source Networking Days in Stockholm so that we can bring this event closer to Scandinavian and European operators, partners, and communities.”

Huawei & Vodafone (London) 
Nermin Mohamed, VP, Solutions and Marketing: “Huawei has been involved in open source for many years, and we are utilizing open source components in our commercial products. We are very active in manyopen source projects, in many communities, including OCP,  OpenStack, Fd.io, ONOS, ODLOPNFV and ONAP. We contribute to open source architectures, use cases, Integration, strategy, and code. And we determine how best to engage with the communities in order to jointly and quickly develop solutions and drive innovations.

Vodafone and Huawei are Pleased to support Linux Foundation’s Open Source Networking Days and host the event in London on October 16th, 2017. We are hoping to share ideas, create solution and have good conversation to drive innovations as we evolve to include on-demand deployment, flexible orchestration, and maximal usage of the resources.”

Orange (Paris)
“Orange places a great deal of trust in open source as it is an environment where operators and manufacturers innovate and even develop together,” said Emmanuel Lugagne Delpon, senior vice president, Orange Labs Networks. “Open source communities enable quick and sustainable innovation, while  also securing future interoperability of these new virtualized networks architectures.”

SUSE (Milan)
“It is a great pleasure for SUSE to support The Linux Foundation’s newly launched Open Source Networking Days,” said Alan Clark, CTO Office, Directing Industry Initiatives, Emerging Standards and Open Source at SUSE and OpenStack Board Chair. “This event offers an ideal communication platform for developers and those interested in learning more about open source innovation. With open source projects such as OpenStack or OPNFV, which are at the core of digital transformation, this event is definitely a highlight.”

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Red Hat is a trademark or registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

2016 in Reflection: A Year of Transitions & Beginnings

By Blog, Popular

prodip-panelA Message from the Board of Directors’ Chair

By Prodip Sen

As we begin 2017, OPNFV is now in its third year of existence. Where we are as a community is evident in the various metrics we use, to observe our health and progress. There are 294 code developers working on 50 approved projects including six automated testing projects; member companies host 16 operational OPNFV labs; and we have completed our third software release—Colorado. There are many other statistics we can look at—but I think these are enough to show that OPNFV is a healthy, productive and useful community that is here to stay.

2016 has been a year of transitions and beginnings.

From a strategic perspective, we have tried to ensure that the activities of OPNFV are aligned with the interests of the member companies, and more importantly the ultimate end users of what we produce—network operators, service providers and enterprise users. But we have done this in a way that preserves the true open source nature of our organization. The strategic planning activities in the OPNFV Board led to the creation of an open Working Group (Polestar), which concentrates on connecting end user requirements to the technical activities of OPNFV, on helping coordinate activities across OPNFV projects to support end-to-end use cases, and on helping upstream communities like OpenStack understand NFV requirements and needs.

The Board has also created an End User Advisory Group, formed by users who operate and deploy large telecommunications and enterprise networks from both member and non-member companies to help provide guidance and requirements. From a governance perspective, the Board and TSC have worked together to expand merit- and community-based participation in the TSC resulting in 5 new Committer-at-Large TSC members, furthering progress toward becoming a meritocracy-based organization.

That we have our fingers on the pulse of our industry is evident in how our community has responded naturally to industry calls for addressing service and operational issues. The Board expanded the scope of OPNFV, from its initial defined scope of the NFVI and the VIM—and the technical community responded by creating projects and working groups in the areas of MANO, testing, security and performance. Our experience in actually integrating software from several open source projects, conducting extensive testing, and creating our ONFV software releases has shown us that the NFV ecosystem needs more than just a reference platform; it also needs a set of tools and processes with which to use it. So we have clarified our goals to reflect that we develop both integrated software for NFV systems and a methodology for NFV.

When I look back at 2016, I can clearly see that this was the year that we began to mature as a community and an organization, and all aspects of our activities have contributed to this. I am looking forward to 2017 as the year where we capitalize on this maturity and accelerate the deployment and implementation of NFV in service provider networks, and support network transformation into the cloud.

The 2016 OPNFV Year In Review Report is now published and I encourage you to read the full report.

Prodip Sen
Chairman of the Board, OPNFV
CTO NFV
HPE Communications Solutions Business