A Match Made in Heaven: ETSI NFV Plugtests + OPNFV Plugfest

Join the ETSI and OPNFV communities in Sophia-Antipolis, France, May 29 – June 8 for co-located ETSI NFV Plugtests and OPNFV Plugfest

By Pierre Lynch, Chair, ETSI NFV ISG, TST Working Group & Lead Technologist at Ixia Solutions Group, Keysight Technologies

The ETSI Plugtests have always had open source community support, with  Open Baton, OpenStack, ETSI OSM and OPNFV as supporting organizations since the beginning. But this is the first time that both the OPNFV Plugfest and the ETSI NFV Plugtests will be held in the same location, at the same time.

Since OPNFV is an integration project incorporating multiple components from various other open source communities into an NFV reference platform, its focus has been on testing from the beginning. Obvious examples of this are the testing projects that are being used by the industry, like Yardstick, Functest, NFVBench and Bottlenecks. Testing is at the core of OPNFV. ETSI, with its Center for Testing and Interoperability (CTI), who run the Plugtests, along with the ETSI NFV TST working group, responsible for testing, experimentation and open source collaboration, also make sure that testing is at the center of attention at ETSI NFV.

With this in mind, the ETSI NFV community is very happy to have testers and developers from both communities assemble under one roof and work together. This is, in my view, such a natural progression of the already excellent relationship between the testing communities of both organizations.

There are multiple ETSI NFV – OPNFV collaboration activities that will happen during the event, which takes place at the ETSI headquarters, May 29 – June 8 in Sophia Antipolis, France:

• The OPNFV Dovetail tool (implementing the OPNFV Verified Program test cases) will have its own track during the Plugtest allowing NFVI+VIM platform vendors and participants to run the OPNFV compliance test suite on the platforms
• The OPNFV SFC feature support will be available to allow MANOs and VNFs who support SFC to test against it
• Multiple OPNFV test frameworks will try to test the platforms (NFVI+VIM) that are participating in the Plugtests
• Contributors for the TST009 work item at ETSI NFV (Testing Specification of Networking Benchmarks and Measurement Methods for NFVI) will be directly attempting the search algorithms from the document using test frameworks from OPNFV. This is an excellent example of standards and open source working hand in hand in order to test concepts immediately by implementing them in order to obtain feedback into the specifications.
• Contributors to the TST010 work item (API Conformance Testing Specification) and OPNFV leaders will discuss how the OPNFV platform can be leveraged to help automate the test suite envisaged by TST010.

There are also multiple OPNFV project meetings that will occur during the Plugfest:

• The edge cloud project team will give an overview on specific operator requirements as well as brainstorm on how to meet those requirements
• The OPNFV Verified Program tool Dovetail will be giving an update on current status and way forward
• Long Duration Test (LDT) will give an update and brainstorm on how to better use monitoring for the tests
• The Yardstick/NSB team will get together to explore NFVI testing, as well as plan for the Gambia release
• A deep dive on how TRex is being used for data plane testing within various OPNFV test frameworks, including NFVBench integration with those other frameworks

And of course, there is an entire set of interoperability test sessions scheduled between all the Plugtests participants, bringing in their NFVI+VIM, VNFs and MANO stacks. As in previous Plugtests, several OPNFV scenarios will be actively involved in those sessions in the role of NFV platform (NFVI+VIM). There will be 47 organizations participating in the 3rd NFV Plugtests, that will start one week ahead of the co-located Plugtests with OPNFV. As with the second ETSI Plugtests, the testing will get more ambitious, bringing in advanced functionality, more EPA test cases, more sophisticated auto-scaling, including scale to level, as well as FM and PM advances. In addition, the experimental API track, started during the last Plugtests in January, will be expanded to include additional APIs. This track allows participants to try out their new API implementations based on ETSI NFV-SOL specifications, and will provide input to the NFV-TST010 specification on NFV Conformance

This will be a busy and productive week for both communities, as these events usually are. However, having both communities together will also lead to more learning and collaboration opportunities unlike no other individual event. We are all looking forward to it.

There is still time to register! Click these links for details on the ETSI NFV Plugtests and OPNFV Plugfest.