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+.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
+.. (c) Cisco Systems, Inc
+
+===============
+External Chains
+===============
+
+NFVbench can measure the performance of 1 or more L3 service chains that are setup externally using OpenStack or without OpenStack.
+Instead of being setup by NFVbench, the complete environment (VNFs and networks) must be setup prior to running NFVbench.
+
+Each external chain is made of 1 or more VNFs and has exactly 2 edge network interfaces (left and right network interfaces)
+that are connected to 2 edge networks (left and right networks).
+The 2 edge networks for each chain can either be shared across all chains or can be independent.
+
+The internal composition of a multi-VNF service chain can be arbitrary (usually linear) as far as NFVbench is concerned,
+the only requirement is that the service chain can route L3 packets properly between the left and right networks.
+
+The network topology of the service chains is defined by the "service_chain_shared_net" option in the
+NFVbench configuration file.
+
+
+Shared Edge Networks
+--------------------
+
+This option is defined when "service_chain_shared_net" is set to true.
+All chains must share the same 2 edge networks and the VNF gateway IP addresses on each edge
+must all belong to the same subnet.
+
+.. image:: images/nfvbench-ext-shared.png
+
+The main advantage of this mode is that only 2 network segments are needed to support an arbitrary number of chains.
+
+
+Multi-VLAN Edge Networks
+------------------------
+
+This option is defined when "service_chain_shared_net" is set to false (default).
+Each chain has its own dedicated left and right network and there is no inter-chain constraint
+on the VNF IP addresses since they all belong to different network segments.
+
+.. image:: images/nfvbench-ext-multi-vlans.png
+
+The advantage of this mode is that the configuration of the VNFs can be made identical (same
+gateway IP addresses, same static routes).
+However this mode requires 2 network segments per chain.
+
+
+Detailed Example
+----------------
+To run NFVbench on an external service chains using shared edge networks:
+
+- tell NFVbench to use external service chain by adding "-sc EXT" or "--service-chain EXT" to NFVbench CLI options
+- specify the number of external chains using the "-scc" option (defaults to 1 chain)
+- if OpenStack is used:
+ - specify the name of the 2 edge networks in "external_networks" in the NFVbench configuration file
+ - The two networks specified have to exist in Neutron ('napa' and 'marin' in the diagram below)
+- if OpenStack is not used:
+ - specify the VLAN id to use for the 2 edge networks in "vlans" in the NFVbench configuration file
+- specify the VNF gateway IPs for the external service chains (1.1.0.2 and 2.2.0.2)
+- specify the traffic generator gateway IPs for the external service chains (1.1.0.102 and 2.2.0.102 in diagram below)
+- specify the packet source and destination IPs for the virtual devices that are simulated (10.0.0.0/8 and 20.0.0.0/8)
+
+.. image:: images/extchain-config.png
+
+L3 routing must be enabled in the VNF and configured to:
+
+- reply to ARP requests to its public IP addresses on both left and right networks
+- route packets from each set of remote devices toward the appropriate dest gateway IP in the traffic generator using 2 static routes (as illustrated in the diagram)
+
+Upon start, NFVbench will:
+- first retrieve the properties of the left and right networks using Neutron APIs,
+- extract the underlying network ID (typically VLAN segmentation ID),
+- generate packets with the proper VLAN ID and measure traffic.
+
+Note that in the case of multiple chains, all chains end interfaces must be connected to the same two left and right networks.
+The traffic will be load balanced across the corresponding gateway IP of these external service chains.