OpenStack Tacker supports TOSCA VNFD templates that allow specifying requirements for a VNF that leverages features of a compute node such as NUMA topology, SR-IOV, Huge pages and CPU pinning. This allows for Enhanced Platform Awareness(EPA) placement of a VNF that has high performance and low latency requirements.
The compute nodes requires configuration in the BIOS, Hypervisor and OpenStack to enable it be an EPA compute node for deploying high performance VNFs.
Below table shows the configurations needed for the different features across BIOS, Hypervisor and OpenStack.
| BIOS | Hypervisor | OpenStack | |
| NUMA Topology | X | X | |
| SR-IOV | X | X | X |
| HyperThreading | X | ||
| Huge Pages | X | ||
| CPU Pinning | X | X |
NOTE: Consult the configuration guide from the Server and NIC vendor to enable NUMA topology, SR-IOV and HyperThreading in BIOS. Also check the Hypervisor documentation to verify if NUMA topology is supported.
Below is a snippet of the /etc/default/grub file in Ubuntu that enables
a) CPU isolation from kernel process to be used for VMs(refer keyword isolcpus in the code block below)
b) Reserving huge memory pages (refer keywords default_hugepagesz, hugepagesz and hugepages in the code block below)
c) Enabling SR-IOV Virtual functions to be exposed (refer keyword intel_iommu in the code block below)
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash isolcpus=8-19 default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=24"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="intel_iommu=on"
NOTE: The above could be different based on the Hypervisor and the hardware architecture of the Server. Please consult the Hypervisor documentation.
Below table shows the OpenStack related files that needs to be configured to enable the EPA features on compute nodes.
| nova.conf | ml2_conf.ini | ml2_conf_sriov.ini | |
| NUMA Topology | X | ||
| SR-IOV | X | X | X |
| CPU Pinning | X |
The NUMA Topology feature enablement on compute nodes requires the NUMATopologyFilter to be added to the scheduler_default_filters in nova.conf file.
The SR-IOV feature enablement requires configuration on both the controller and compute nodes. Please refer link similar to below for the appropriate OpenStack release to setup SR-IOV: http://docs.openstack.org/networking-guide/adv-config-sriov.html
The CPU Pinning feature enablement requires configuring the nova.conf on compute nodes. It requires an entry similar to below:
[DEFAULT]
vcpu_pin_set = 8-19
cpu_allocation_ratio = 1.0
[libvirt]
virt_type = kvm
NOTE: Please refer OpenStack release documentation for configuring the above mentioned features.
Once the compute nodes have been prepared for high performance requirement VNF deployments, the next step would be to create an ‘aggregate-list’ and availability zone from the compute nodes identified for VNF deployments. Below commands illustrates an example of creating such an aggregate-list, availability zone and adding compute nodes.
nova aggregate-create NFV-AGG NFV-AZ
nova aggregate-add-host NFV-AGG <NFV_HOST1>
nova aggregate-add-host NFV-AGG <NFV_HOST2>
NOTE: Consult http://docs.openstack.org/cli-reference/nova.html for latest supported commands.
Find below snippet of VNFD template that specifies the EPA Availability Zone created as part of the VDU properties using availability_zone property.
vdu1:
type: tosca.nodes.nfv.VDU.Tacker
capabilities:
nfv_compute:
properties:
disk_size: 10 GB
mem_size: 2048 MB
num_cpus: 2
mem_page_size: large
properties:
availability_zone: NFV-AZ
image: cirros
Once OpenStack/Devstack along with Tacker has been successfully installed, deploy a sample EPA template such as tosca-vnfd-hugepages.yaml from location below: https://github.com/openstack/tacker/tree/master/samples/tosca-templates/vnfd
Refer the ‘Getting Started’ link below on how to create a VNFD and deploy a VNF: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/tacker/install/getting_started.html