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+.. _opnfv-overview:
+
+.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
+.. (c) Open Platform for NFV Project, Inc. and its contributors
+
+================
+Platform overview
+================
+
+Introduction
+============
+
+Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is transforming the networking industry via
+software-defined infrastructures and open source is the proven method for quickly developing
+software for commercial products and services that can move markets.
+Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV
+components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration,
+deployment and testing, OPNFV constructs a reference NFV platform to accelerate the
+transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.
+As an open source project, OPNFV is uniquely positioned to bring together the work
+of standards bodies, open source communities, service providers and commercial suppliers to deliver
+a de facto NFV platform for the industry.
+
+By integrating components from upstream projects, the community is able to conduct performance
+and use case-based testing on a variety of solutions to ensure the platform’s suitability for
+NFV use cases. OPNFV also works upstream with other open source communities to bring contributions
+and learnings from its work directly to those communities in the form of blueprints, patches, bugs,
+and new code.
+
+OPNFV initially focused on building NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtualised Infrastructure
+Management (VIM) by integrating components from upstream projects such as OpenDaylight,
+OpenStack, Ceph Storage, KVM, Open vSwitch, and Linux.
+More recently, OPNFV has extended its portfolio of forwarding solutions to include fd.io and ODP,
+is able to run on both Intel and ARM commercial and white-box hardware, support VM, Container and
+BareMetal workloads, and includes Management and Network Orchestration MANO components primarily
+for application composition and management in the Danube release.
+
+These capabilities, along with application programmable interfaces (APIs) to other NFV
+elements, form the basic infrastructure required for Virtualized Network Functions (VNF)
+and MANO components.
+
+Concentrating on these components while also considering proposed projects on additional
+topics (such as the MANO components and applications themselves), OPNFV aims to enhance
+NFV services by increasing performance and power efficiency improving reliability,
+availability and serviceability, and delivering comprehensive platform instrumentation.
+
+
+OPNFV Platform Architecture
+===========================
+
+The OPNFV project addresses a number of aspects in the development of a consistent virtualisation
+platform including common hardware requirements, software architecture, MANO and applications.
+
+
+OPNFV Platform Overview Diagram
+
+.. image:: ../images/opnfvplatformgraphic.png
+   :alt: Overview infographic of the opnfv platform and projects.
+
+
+To address these areas effectively, the OPNFV platform architecture can be decomposed
+into the following basic building blocks:
+
+* Hardware: with the Infra working group, Pharos project and associated activities
+* Software Platform: through the platform integration and deployment projects
+* MANO: through the MANO working group and associated projects
+* Applications: which affect all other areas and drive requirements for OPNFV
+
+OPNFV Lab Infrastructure
+========================
+
+The infrastructure working group oversees such topics as lab management, workflow,
+definitions, metrics and tools for OPNFV infrastructure.
+
+Fundamental to the WG is the
+`Pharos Specification <https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/pharos/Pharos+Specification>`_
+which provides a set of defined lab infrastructures over a geographically and technically
+diverse federated global OPNFV lab.
+
+Labs may instantiate bare-metal and virtual environments that are accessed remotely by the
+community and used for OPNFV platform and feature development, build, deploy and testing.
+No two labs are the same and the heterogeneity of the Pharos environment provides the ideal
+platform for establishing hardware and software abstractions providing well understood
+performance characteristics.
+
+Community labs are hosted by OPNFV member companies on a voluntary basis.
+The Linux Foundation also hosts an OPNFV lab that provides centralized CI
+and other production resources which are linked to community labs.
+Future lab capabilities will include the ability easily automate deploy and test of any
+OPNFV install scenario in any lab environment as well as on a nested "lab as a service"
+virtual infrastructure.
+
+OPNFV Software Platform Architecture
+====================================
+
+The OPNFV software platform is comprised exclusively of open source implementations of
+platform component pieces.  OPNFV is able to draw from the rich ecosystem of NFV related
+technologies available in open-source then integrate, test, measure and improve these
+components in conjunction with our source communities.
+
+While the composition of the OPNFV software platform is highly complex and constituted of many
+projects and components, a subset of these projects gain the most attention from the OPNFV community
+to drive the development of new technologies and capabilities.
+
+---------------------------------
+Virtual Infrastructure Management
+---------------------------------
+
+OPNFV derives it's virtual infrastructure management from one of our largest upstream ecosystems
+OpenStack.  OpenStack provides a complete reference cloud management system and associated technologies.
+While the OpenStack community sustains a broad set of projects, not all technologies are relevant in
+an NFV domain, the OPNFV community consumes a sub-set of OpenStack projects where the usage and
+composition may vary depending on the installer and scenario.
+
+For details on the scenarios available in OPNFV and the specific composition of components
+refer to the :ref:`OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide <opnfv-user-config>`
+
+-----------------
+Operating Systems
+-----------------
+
+OPNFV currently uses Linux on all target machines, this can include Ubuntu, Centos or SUSE linux. The
+specific version of Linux used for any deployment is documented in the installation guide.
+
+-----------------------
+Networking Technologies
+-----------------------
+
+SDN Controllers
+---------------
+
+OPNFV, as an NFV focused project, has a significant investment on networking technologies
+and provides a broad variety of integrated open source reference solutions.  The diversity
+of controllers able to be used in OPNFV is supported by a similarly diverse set of
+forwarding technologies.
+
+There are many SDN controllers available today relevant to virtual environments
+where the OPNFV community supports and contributes to a number of these.  The controllers
+being worked on by the community during this release of OPNFV include:
+
+* Neutron: an OpenStack project to provide “network connectivity as a service” between
+  interface devices (e.g., vNICs) managed by other OpenStack services (e.g., nova).
+* OpenDaylight: addresses multivendor, traditional and greenfield networks, establishing the
+  industry’s de facto SDN platform and providing the foundation for networks of the future.
+* ONOS: a carrier-grade SDN network operating system designed for high availability,
+  performance, scale-out.
+
+.. OpenContrail SDN controller is planned to be supported in the next release.
+
+Data Plane
+----------
+
+OPNFV extends Linux virtual networking capabilities by using virtual switching
+and routing components. The OPNFV community proactively engages with these source
+communities to address performance, scale and resiliency needs apparent in carrier
+networks.
+
+* FD.io (Fast data - Input/Output): a collection of several projects and libraries to
+  amplify the transformation that began with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to support
+  flexible, programmable and composable services on a generic hardware platform.
+* Open vSwitch: a production quality, multilayer virtual switch designed to enable
+  massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard
+  management interfaces and protocols.
+
+Deployment Architecture
+=======================
+
+A typical OPNFV deployment starts with three controller nodes running in a high availability
+configuration including control plane components from OpenStack, SDN, etc. and a minimum
+of two compute nodes for deployment of workloads (VNFs).
+A detailed description of the hardware requirements required to support the 5 node configuration
+can be found in pharos specification: `Pharos Project <https://www.opnfv.org/developers/pharos>`_
+
+In addition to the deployment on a highly available physical infrastructure, OPNFV can be
+deployed for development and lab purposes in a virtual environment.  In this case each of the hosts
+is provided by a virtual machine and allows control and workload placement using nested virtualization.
+
+The initial deployment is done using a staging server, referred to as the "jumphost".
+This server-either physical or virtual-is first installed with the installation program
+that then installs OpenStack and other components on the controller nodes and compute nodes.
+See the :ref:`OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide <opnfv-user-config>` for more details.
+
+
+The OPNFV Testing Ecosystem
+===========================
+
+The OPNFV community has set out to address the needs of virtualization in the carrier
+network and as such platform validation and measurements are a cornerstone to the
+iterative releases and objectives.
+
+To simplify the complex task of feature, component and platform validation and characterization
+the testing community has established a fully automated method for addressing all key areas of
+platform validation. This required the integration of a variety of testing frameworks in our CI
+systems, real time and automated analysis of results, storage and publication of key facts for
+each run as shown in the following diagram.
+
+.. image:: ../images/OPNFV_testing_working_group.png
+  :alt: Overview infographic of the OPNFV testing Ecosystem
+
+Release Verification
+====================
+
+The OPNFV community relies on its testing community to establish release criteria for each OPNFV
+release. Each release cycle the testing criteria become more stringent and better representative
+of our feature and resiliency requirements.
+
+
+As each OPNFV release establishes a set of deployment scenarios to validate, the testing
+infrastructure and test suites need to accommodate these features and capabilities. It’s not
+only in the validation of the scenarios themselves where complexity increases, there are test
+cases that require multiple datacenters to execute when evaluating features, including multisite
+and distributed datacenter solutions.
+
+The release criteria as established by the testing teams include passing a set of test cases
+derived from the functional testing project ‘functest,’ a set of test cases derived from our
+platform system and performance test project ‘yardstick,’ and a selection of test cases for
+feature capabilities derived from other test projects such as bottlenecks, vsperf, cperf and
+storperf. The scenario needs to be able to be deployed, pass these tests, and be removed from
+the infrastructure iteratively (no less that 4 times) in order to fulfil the release criteria.
+
+--------
+Functest
+--------
+
+Functest provides a functional testing framework incorporating a number of test suites
+and test cases that test and verify OPNFV platform functionality.
+The scope of Functest and relevant test cases can be found in the :ref:`Functest User Guide <functest-userguide>`
+
+Functest provides both feature project and component test suite integration, leveraging
+OpenStack and SDN controllers testing frameworks to verify the key components of the OPNFV
+platform are running successfully.
+
+---------
+Yardstick
+---------
+
+Yardstick is a testing project for verifying the infrastructure compliance when running VNF applications.
+Yardstick benchmarks a number of characteristics and performance vectors on the infrastructure making it
+a valuable pre-deployment NFVI testing tools.
+
+Yardstick provides a flexible testing framework for launching other OPNFV testing projects.
+
+There are two types of test cases in Yardstick:
+
+* Yardstick generic test cases and OPNFV feature test cases;
+  including basic characteristics benchmarking in compute/storage/network area.
+* OPNFV feature test cases include basic telecom feature testing from OPNFV projects;
+  for example nfv-kvm, sfc, ipv6, Parser, Availability and SDN VPN
+
+System Evaluation and compliance testing
+========================================
+
+The OPNFV community is developing a set of test suites intended to evaluate a set of reference
+behaviors and capabilities for NFV systems developed externally from the OPNFV ecosystem to
+evaluate and measure their ability to provide the features and capabilities developed in the
+OPNFV ecosystem.
+
+The Dovetail project will provide a test framework and methodology able to be used on any NFV platform,
+including an agreed set of test cases establishing an evaluation criteria for exercising
+an OPNFV compatible system. The Dovetail project has begun establishing the test framework
+and will provide a preliminary methodology for the Danube release. Work will continue to
+develop these test cases to establish a stand alone compliance evaluation solution
+in future releases.
+
+Additional Testing
+==================
+
+Besides the test suites and cases for release verification, additional testing is performed to validate
+specific features or characteristics of the OPNFV platform.
+These testing framework and test cases may include some specific needs; such as extended measurements,
+additional testing stimuli, or tests simulating environmental disturbances or failures.
+
+These additional testing activities provide a more complete evaluation of the OPNFV platform.
+Some of the projects focused on these testing areas include:
+
+------
+VSPERF
+------
+
+VSPERF provides an automated test-framework and comprehensive test suite for measuring data-plane
+performance of the NFVI including switching technology, physical and virtual network interfaces.
+The provided test cases with network topologies can be customized while also allowing individual
+versions of Operating System, vSwitch and hypervisor to be specified.
+
+-----------
+Bottlenecks
+-----------
+
+Bottlenecks provides a framework to find system limitations and bottlenecks, providing
+root cause isolation capabilities to facilitate system evaluation.
+
+
+.. _`OPNFV Configuration Guide`: `OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide`
+.. _`OPNFV User Guide`: `OPNFV User Guide & Configuration Guide`
+.. _`Dovetail project`: https://wiki.opnfv.org/display/dovetail