Open-source NFV Project rolls out third platform release

Article By : Graham Prophet

The OPNFV release enables the community to become even more fluent in system level feature development and testing in support of NFV.

Open-source network functions virtualisation (NFV) project, OPNFV has delivered its third platform release, the OPNFV Colorado.

Colorado includes advances that accelerate the development of NFV applications and services through key feature enhancements across security, IPv6, Service Function Chaining (SFC), testing, VPN capabilities, and support for multiple hardware architectures.

“Colorado represents a more robust version of OPNFV’s previous Brahmaputra platform,” said Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV.

Enhancements available in OPNFV Colorado include:

• Core feature upgrades. These improvements come via focused collaboration with upstream communities and are centred on improving foundational support for NFV applications and services. All feature enhancements are integrated into the automated install/deploy/testing framework.
• Enhanced security by earning the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge for best practices in open source development; additionally, the Moon project has been prototyping identity federation and management for OpenStack and OpenDaylight.
• Service Function Chaining (SFC) now runs across multiple nodes, includes installer support for VNF Manager (Tacker) installation and support for enhanced cloud scenarios.
• Improved IPv6 support includes IPv6-only deployments, full underlay and overlay support and integration with additional install tools.
• The SDN VPN project now enables full Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPN support including BGP peering.
• Full support for multiple hardware architectures, including both ARM and x86 architectures.
• Enhanced testing capabilities. Colorado includes a greater integration across testing projects with additional feature testing capabilities, and increased automation.
• Infrastructure and testing environment advancements. The Pharos test lab project continues to be a key element of OPNFV release development and validation. Colorado brings improved governance, consistency, availability, and quality to the labs, increasing efficiency and creating the groundwork for a robust Lab-as-a-Service program. See the full list of Pharos labs, including those participating in Colorado, here.
• Community expansion. Improved cross-project collaboration via working groups focused on management and operation (MANO), infrastructure, security and testing.

Five committers-at-large members have been elected to the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to enhance the meritocratic nature of the project.

OPNFV also continues to build relationships with key upstream communities such as OpenStack, OpenDaylight, ONOS, OpenContrail, FD.io, OVS, Open-O, OpenBaton, KVM, DPDK, ODP and Linux.