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

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.

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