The 4th ETSI Plugtests event is round the corner, and in this blog, I will explain how NFVI/VIM vendors, VNF vendors and hardware vendors can work with us to test ANOD (Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution) with their respective offerings at the Plugtests. This is the first time ONAP will be at a Plugtests, and we are very excited to gain end-to-end ONAP testing experience.
NFVI/VIM
First, let us look at NFVI/VIM vendors. The Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution can be connected to any other Openstack/StarlingX deployment that complies to Ocata or later APIs. At the Plugtests, we would like to verify the interoperability with Openstack deployments from various NFVI/VIM vendors.
VNF Vendors
Next, let us look at VNF vendors. ANOD provides two orchestration paths (SO NFVO/gVNFM for Heat VNF descriptors and SO→VF-C NFVO for TOSCA VNF descriptors using an external sVNFM).
There are broadly 3 areas that need attention from VNF vendors’ point of view for onboarding their VNF’s onto ONAP.
- If the VNF/Network Services are going to be orchestrated using SO in ONAP, they need to create HEAT descriptors for their VNFs. If these descriptors already exist ( i.e. if these VNFs are already running as Virtual Machines under Openstack), these descriptors can be reused, with some changes needed as part of ONAP onboarding.
- If the VNF/Network Services are going to be orchestrated using VFC in ONAP, they need TOSCA descriptors for the VNFs. Additionally, there needs to be a ETSI SOL-003 compliant sVNFM as well.
- Lastly, the VNF vendors can use ONAP tools to test their VNF descriptors for compliance, using VVP (for HEAT based templates) or VNFSDK (for TOSCA based templates).
Once the above steps are completed, we can work together with the VNF vendor to execute the official Plugtests test plan. The test plan can include an NFVI/VIM vendor or we can use the OPNFV scenario included with ANOD. Time permitting, we can also perform some closed-loop automation testing by creating a collector, analytics pipeline and a Policy.
Hardware Vendors
The Plugtests can also be used to ensure that ONAP functionality is validated on the target hardware platform. This will involve deploying ANOD on the target servers, and using ONAP and Openstack (either the OPNFV scenario included with ANOD or from any other NFVI/VIM vendor) to test end to end functionality of deploying VNFs (open source or from one of the above vendors). This activity could bring all 4 players together - NFVI/VIM, VNF vendors and hardware vendors along with the Aarna.ml ONAP Distribution to execute the official Plugtests test plan.