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Chapter 1. Overview of Network Functions Virtualization

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

For a high level overview of 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 might vary from your topology and use case.

Use Red Hat OpenStack Platform director to isolate specific network types, for example, external, project, internal API, and so on. You can deploy a network on a single network interface, or distributed over a multiple-host network interface. With Open vSwitch you can create bonds by assigning multiple interfaces to a single bridge. Configure network isolation in a Red Hat OpenStack Platform installation with template files. If you do not provide template files, the service networks deploy on the provisioning network. There are two types of template configuration files:

network-environment.yaml
This file contains network details, such as subnets and IP address ranges, for the overcloud nodes. This file also contains the different settings that override the default parameter values for various scenarios.
compute.yaml and controller.yaml
These files contain the host network interface configuration for the overcloud nodes.
host-config-and-reboot.yaml
This file replaces the deprecated first-boot.yaml file, and contains configuration for host installation.

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

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

Note

You use YAML files to outline NFV configuration. For more information about the YAML file format, see YAML in a Nutshell