Use HSC’s “Distributed Virtualization Test Framework” if you are looking at easy solutions to any of the following problems:

1. How to measure the performance of your node in a given virtual deployment?
2. How to integrate your existing test environment in a virtual network environment and scale it along with the product?
3. How to provide the right level of infrastructure abstraction and automation, regardless of the system scale expected?
4. How to utilize the same test environment for functionality testing of the virtual functions as well as system performance under load conditions?
5. How to emulate latency and bandwidth restrictions on virtual links?
6. How to go from emulating 10s or 100s of user emulations to 100,000s of user emulation without substantially rewriting your test scripts?
7. How to capture and verify the outcome of 100,000 TPMs from 1000s of virtual endpoints in near real time?
8. How to provide detailed logging in near real-time in operational environments?

This OpenStack based test framework can help you test your s/w from multiple perspectives – functionality, load, scalability of solutions, performance benchmarking, diagnostics and analytics.

The s/w component under test might be a 3gpp core n/w entity, any EPC component, MEC services or any other services following micro-services based architecture. It can run as a VNF in context of a VM or a container.

Description

The test framework allows a tester to design his network using GUI based orchestration tool. The GUI based orchestration tool also supports the provisioning of service function chains to define an end to end network service. The framework translates the user provided configuration to OpenStack templates and deploys the network on the infrastructure.

HSC’s Distributed Virtualization Test Framework supports an easy-to-integrate SDK whose APIs can be called from any proprietary application code base under test. These SDK APIs can be used to:

• Publish the desired information from a service endpoint or s/w entity. The subscription scales to any number of subscribers and the publisher does not need to know about the subscribers before-hand.
• Subscribe for the info published from a service endpoint and get near real-time updates, whenever the subscribed variable changes in any publishing agent.
• Register/deregister/retrieve service endpoints
• Support ELK based real-time logging for any service endpoint of interest
• Define different scaling criteria for each service point as per the business needs
• Allow user-defined scaling parameters
• Allow dynamic configuration (latency, delay etc.) of links between different network entities

Using an optional SDN controller, OVS or OVS-DPDK based virtual data bus, this solution promises real-time data sharing and logging in a distributed deployment. Inter-VM data or logging data is shared over OVS bridge or DPDK compliant OVS bridge using the OVS-DPDK provided para-virtualized virtio PMD.

Features

• GUI based orchestration to design the network
• Support to add service function chains for different network services
• Support for VMs and lightweight containers
• Easy provisioning of resources and collection/analysis of Key Performance Indicators
• SDK offers language binding in Python, C/C++, and Java
• System-meters based scaling as well as custom logic scaling of VNFs
• Multiple types of Publishing for data sharing - state/variable/tag based, context-based
• Multiple types of subscription data sharing – state/variable/tag based, logical Id based, context-based
• Sequence-independent publisher-subscribers
• ELK framework based centralized logging
• Leverages OVS-DPDK based networking for real-time data sharing
• SDN controlled virtual bus for distributed deployment

Dependencies

Though not mandatory to use, but to attain real-time data sharing in a virtualized environment, following requirements exist:

• OpenVswitch
• DPDK vhost user interfaces
• High-speed DPDK NIC cards

Practical Applications

The aforesaid accelerator solution can be applied in the following use-cases

1. Testing core n/w functions (SGW, PGW, MME, PCRF) from multiple vendors
2. Testing functional, fail-over and recovery handling in a microservice based implementation of network applications
3. Application Function Testing for an MEC environment with different architectures and LADNs
4. Provide a plurality of network equipment ecosystem needed to test IoT applications