Chapter 1. Overview

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a software solution that virtualizes a network function on general purpose, cloud based infrastructure. NFV allows the Communication Service Provider to move away from traditional hardware.

For a high level overview of the NFV concepts, see the Network Functions Virtualization Product Guide.

Note

OVS-DPDK and SR-IOV configuration depends on your hardware and topology. This guide provides examples for CPU assignments, memory allocation, and NIC configurations that may vary from your topology and use case.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform director allows you to isolate the overcloud networks. Using this feature, you can separate specific network types (for example, external, tenant, internal API and so on) into isolated networks. You can deploy a network on a single network interface or distributed over a multiple host network interface. Open vSwitch allows you to create bonds by assigning multiple interfaces to a single bridge. Network isolation in a Red Hat OpenStack Platform installation is configured using template files. If you do not provide template files, all the service networks are deployed on the provisioning network. There are three types of template configuration files:

  • network-environment.yaml - this file contains the network details such as, subnets, IP address ranges that are used for the network configuration on the overcloud nodes. In addition, this file also contains the different settings that override the default parameter values for various scenarios.
  • Host network templates (for example, compute.yaml , controller.yaml) - Define the network interface configuration for the overcloud nodes. The values of the network details are provided by the network-environment.yaml file.

  • Post install configuration file (post-install.yaml) - Provides various post configuration steps, for example:

    • Tuned installation and configuration. The tuned package contains the tuned daemon that monitors the use of system components and dynamically tunes system settings based on that monitoring information. To provide proper CPU affinity configuration in OVS-DPDK and SR-IOV deployments, you should use the tuned cpu-partitioning profile. See the Performance Tuning Guide for details on this package.

These heat template files are located at /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/ on the undercloud node.

The following sections provide more details on how to plan and configure the heat template files for NFV using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director.

Note

NFV configuration makes use of YAML files. See YAML in a Nutshell for an introduction to the YAML file format.