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eBOOK Making the most of SDN and NFV with Ubuntu OpenStackTools to help telcos and service providers succeed

Making the most of SDN and NFV with Ubuntu OpenStack

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This ebook addresses the implementation of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) on carrier-grade IT architecture, using the world’s leading open source cloud platform, Ubuntu OpenStack.

Canonical, the software vendor behind Ubuntu OpenStack, does not produce SDN or NFV applications itself. But in developing, supporting and backing Ubuntu OpenStack, the company is uniquely positioned to assist telcos wrestling with how best to implement these technologies.

If you’re involved in the design of systems architecture for the telecoms industry, this ebook is for you.

Is this ebook right for me?

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Over the past decade, the IT industry has undergone radical, disruptive change in the form of virtualisation. Its adoption – and that of its revolutionary descendant, cloud computing – has transformed the datacentre. Several forces lie behind this shift, including:

• The desire for faster scalability and on-demand computing

• Downward pressure on infrastructure and management costs

• Competitive demands to get new applications to market faster

These drivers have led to a rise in the demand for open source cloud solutions in the enterprise, with OpenStack emerging as the leading platform.

New problems mean new opportunities

The very same issues are now emerging in the telecoms industry, which means network operators need to make similar architectural advances. But telco networks often comprise large, siloed, proprietary platforms that can be hard to manage and scale.

Cost and complexity can be amplified if hardware-based appliances are dedicated to performing single functions on the network. These appliances typically have short lifecycles and consume large amounts of space and power. The good news is that they are ripe for replacement by virtual technology.

With the growth of multimedia applications, mobile and IoT causing an explosion in network traffic, while revenues from new services prove ever-harder to come by, technologies like SDN and NFV offer the potential for telcos to unleash new capabilities. With the right platform and tools, the telecoms industry can see new levels of agility, just as IT did before it.

IT problems are now telecoms problems





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Meet the authors

Chris is responsible for the commercial success of Ubuntu in both public and private cloud. He is responsible for Canonical’s direct and channel business around Ubuntu Openstack as well as Canonical’s global partnerships with the likes of IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure. The Canonical Telco Cloud practice has been involved in hundred’s of OpenStack projects.

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisKenyonEU

Chris Kenyon

Senior Vice President, Cloud Sales & Business Development

Mark Baker

Product Manager, Ubuntu OpenStack

Mark is tasked with making sure the development of Ubuntu OpenStack is driven by the needs of its users in the enterprise and among service providers and mobile network operators. This necessitates close involvement with the management and development of OpenStack.

Follow Mark on Twitter: @markabaker




https://twitter.com/chriskenyoneu

https://twitter.com/markabaker


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Addressing the unique requirements of the telecoms sector 05

Network functions virtualisation (NFV) 07

Software-defined networking (SDN) 08

Canonical’s NFV/SDN-enabling solutions 09

The Ubuntu operating system 09

Ubuntu OpenStack 09

Juju (for service orchestration) 09

MAAS (for bare metal equipment automation) 10

Landscape (management for large-scale deployments) 10

The Ubuntu Interoperability Lab (OIL) 10

Ubuntu for NFV 11

Conclusion 13

About Canonical 14

Contents





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The current combination of market conditions and network constraints is forcing telcos to pursue a cloud-based approach, much like that adopted by the IT industry. But the technologies and design principles that work for typical IT cloud applications cannot be applied to network services without accounting for carrier-grade requirements.

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), coupled with software-defined networking (SDN), offer a way for network operators to address these problems. By deploying OpenStack as the enabling cloud platform, you can implement NFV and SDN to further reduce costs and position your business competitively against over-the-top (OTT) players.

The unique requirements of the telecoms sector

REDUCE COSTS AND POSITION YOUR BUSINESS COMPETITIVELY

AGAINST OVER�THE�TOP �OTT� PLAYERS





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The goal of NFV is to decouple logical network functions from the underlying hardware. The principles of NFV were defined by the European Telecommunications Standard Institute (ETSI) committee formed by a group of NOs and described in a white paper published in 2012.

In general, NFV as a network architecture concept proposes the use of technologies common in IT infrastructure virtualisation and cloud computing, and applying them to telecom networks to create virtualised network functions (VNF). Utilising VNF building blocks as a basis, telcos can create communication services comprised of these blocks interconnected, or chained, together. In this environment, VNF is deployed on one or more virtual machines running different virtual network function components (VNFC), software and processes. Instead of custom or proprietary hardware appliances, NFV emphasises the use of common, off-the-shelf hardware such as high-volume servers, switches, and storage.

NFV brings several benefits to the telecommunication industry, including:

• Telecom vendors and NOs can leverage ideas and solutions from the innovative, fast-moving data center ecosystem

• Re-use of existing hardware by NOs will help to control OPEX and CAPEX and promote vendors who can provide innovative software appliances

• Invite new software-centric vendors and in-house software development. This will lead to increased innovation and agility of the telco services.

Network functions virtualisation (NFV)





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SDN is defined as the separation of the control plane and the data plane, i.e. decoupling the switching or routing from the packet forwarding engine and making the control plane programmable. This allows you to modify and manage network layout, traffic flows, and quality of service easily – and quickly deploy it in enterprise data centres. This, in turn, leads to the commoditisation of traditional networking hardware such as routers and switches, freeing you from vendor lock-in and potentially bringing hardware costs down.

There is no doubt that the telecoms industry needs new ways to innovate and deploy services more flexibly. SDN could enable the evolution from the traditional approach of how mobile and fixed line operators provide connectivity to a more flexible, on-demand bandwidth and new service delivery. For OTT players (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and many large enterprise data centres (including most large telco operators), SDN is already a reality.

In the case of telcos specifically, SDN also brings some unique challenges, like the need to migrate and/or integrate existing systems and software with a new dynamic environment. This is true on all levels, starting from the OSS/BSS systems usually designed, developed and deployed for less dynamic telco networks.

With the introduction of SDN and NFV, those systems have to deal with new challenges and more complex provisioning scenarios spanning all layers, as opposed to the current, isolated network layer approach. And the same telco-specific challenges and requirements for SDN are true for other areas of telecom network subsystems like Core and Radio, where network latency, QoS and performance are key challenges.

Software-defined networking (SDN)





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Canonical does not build its own NFV or SDN solutions, but instead enables those applications to run on a robust infrastructure, allowing you to orchestrate and manage your services in an innovative and cost-effective way. Each part of the Canonical portfolio plays a part in the enablement of these technologies, as described in the following sections.

The Ubuntu operating system

Ubuntu is the dominant operating system in the cloud, with a penetration of 55%-70% for public clouds such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure, and private clouds built on platforms such as OpenStack.

Ubuntu brings you the best of both worlds: the rapid innovation and continuous improvement of an open source project, together with the discipline and rigour of a commercial offering, as evidenced by its six-monthly release cycle and industry-leading SLAs for maintenance and support, including five-year support for major releases.

Canonical’s NFV/SDN enabling solutions





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Ubuntu OpenStack

Ubuntu has been the reference operating system for OpenStack since its inception. This means that OpenStack was developed on Ubuntu and is always tested on Ubuntu first. Many of the tools and processes established by the Ubuntu community were adopted by the OpenStack project, and most early developers of OpenStack came from Canonical. To this day, Ubuntu OpenStack remains the closest distribution to trunk, and, unsurprisingly, the most popular among OpenStack users worldwide.

Monitor machine and service utilisation via the Ubuntu OpenStack dashboard





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Juju (for service orchestration)

Juju allows any software to be deployed, integrated and scaled in minutes – on public clouds like AWS or Azure, on private clouds built on OpenStack, VMware etc or on networks of bare metal machines. Juju allows the provisioning of software to be defined in any language or via any tool, be it Puppet, Chef, Ansible or any similar technology. Its strength is its ability to automate integration and to orchestrate complete solutions, quickly and easily. Even the most complex deployment can be completed in minutes, saving days of valuable time. Juju can also orchestrate individual servers and even large groups of servers and equipment, via MAAS. It also has a powerful GUI (see opposite), which allows you to visualise your architecture as it’s deployed, managing it with just a few mouse clicks. An entire environment deployed using Juju in minutes





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MAAS (for bare metal equipment automation)

Provisioning hardware used to be a manual exercise. But with clouds now often comprising thousands of servers, doing it manually is no longer feasible. Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) solves this problem, allowing physical equipment to be managed as if it were virtual.

MAAS can manage thousands of physical systems and their inventory, scaling up and down as needed. It begins by creating an inventory of every machine and its internals, even allowing them to be remotely powered on or off. Different operating systems can be deployed automatically and different architectures supported. MAAS is the only solution that allows provisioning of both Intel and ARM cartridges on HP’s most innovative server, Moonshot.

MAAS provisions thousands of machines using a simple web UI





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Landscape (management for large-scale deployments)

The Landscape systems management tool helps monitor, manage and update an entire Ubuntu infrastructure from a single intuitive interface. Part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage support service, Landscape automates patching, upgrades, rollbacks and all other common administrative tasks, for both physical and virtual machines.

Landscape provisions your production-ready environment and monitors machine and service utlisation





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The Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL)

Canonical has a long history of interoperability testing between OpenStack and Ubuntu. To bring the benefits of our work to the rest of the ecosystem, we’ve launched the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL), making it easier for you to QA the compatibility of your products with the world’s leading open cloud platform. Currently, over 3,000 different combinations are tested in OIL every month.

Our process tests current and future developments of OpenStack against current and future developments of Ubuntu Server. As the ecosystem has grown, we’ve expanded it to include different guest operating systems, hypervisors and leading SDN stacks, both commercial and open source.

We also routinely work with IT and telco partners familiar with Ubuntu and OpenStack but unfamiliar with Juju, MAAS and Landscape, to help them more fully integrate their solution with Ubuntu.





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Ubuntu for NFV

The overall Canonical product offering (including Juju, MAAS and Ubuntu OpenStack) is fully aligned with the NFV architecture.

Juju allows the orchestration of all IT and telco assets including VNFC, VNF services, VNFM and VNFO functions in a multi-cloud and multi-datacenter environment. It also provides an API and infrastructure for external specialised telco NFVO.

Ubuntu OpenStack is aligned with the VIM concept and provides a standard, Neutron-based plug-in mechanism for vendor-specific SDN implementations.

MAAS can be utilised for image-based DC and virtual infrastructure management tasks.

Ubuntu OpenStack is a full, official OpenStack Distribution and therefore includes Nova Compute. It contains drivers for KVM, vCenter and Hyper-V as well as Linux Containers (LXC). KVM is supported natively. vCenter uses several drivers to connect with different parts of OpenStack.

For Nova Compute, the VMware VCDriver is used. Hyper-V works slightly differently: the Nova service is installed locally on the Windows 2012 Server with the Hyper-V role enabled. Python components and the ‘nova- compute’ service are installed directly onto the Windows platform.

Canonical has partnered with CloudBase Solutions, the company leading Hyper-V integration with OpenStack. The partnership covers full support of Hyper-V with Ubuntu OpenStack as well as the ability to orchestrate Hyper-V nodes in Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju. Bare-metal provisioning is provided by MAAS, which enables hardware to be provisioned on demand and workloads allocated to them as if a new virtual machine is being launched. MAAS is fully automated and tightly integrated with Juju to provide advanced NFV VIM functions, which manage the service’s lifecycle on the platform.





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EMS 1 EMS 2 EMS 3

VNF 1 VNF 2 VNF 3

VirtualComputing

Virtualisation Layer

VirtualStorage

VirtualNetwork

ComputingHardware

StorageHardware

NetworkHardware

OSS/BSS

NFVI

Service, VNF and Infrastructure Description

NFV Management & Orchestration

The Ubuntu cloud portfolio mapped to an NFV architecture

IDMManager(s)

VirtualisedInfrastructure

Manager(s)

Os-Ma

Os-Vnfm

Se-Ma

Ve-Vnfm

Or-

Vi

Nf-Vi

Vi-Vnfm

IDMManager(s)

VirtualisedInfrastructure

Manager(s)

Os-Vnfm

Or-

Vi

Vi-Vnfm

+VNF

Manager&

VNFCCharms

+VFN

IntegrationCharms

OpenStack

ExternalOrchestration

MAAS





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With the rapid adoption of technologies such as SDN and NFV, the need has never been greater for telcos to gain a better understanding of general IT infrastructure, virtualisation, and cloud technologies. There is also a growing need for a strong and broad ecosystem , providing a wider choice for anyone in the industry with a desire to embrace these new technologies and ensure their benefits are realised without compromising quality standards or SLA commitments.

Canonical is a trusted partner to the world’s largest telcos in enabling their NFV and SDN strategies. We provide the expertise necessary to allow projects to be delivered on time and on budget, while leaving our clients in the telecoms sector to focus on what matters most: running their businesses successfully.

For a free, no-obligation consultation, please call +44 20 7630 2400, or email [email protected]

Alternatively, you can request more information at ubuntu.com/cloud/contact-us

Conclusion




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http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/contact-us


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At Canonical, we are passionate about the potential of open source software to transform business. For over a decade, we have supported the development of Ubuntu and promoted its adoption in the enterprise.

By providing custom engineering, support contracts and training, we help clients in the telecoms and IT services industries to cut costs, improve efficiency and tighten security with Ubuntu and OpenStack. We work with hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell and Intel, to ensure the software we create can be delivered on the world’s most popular devices. And we contribute thousands of man-hours every year to projects like OpenStack, to ensure that the world’s best open source software continues to fulfil its potential.

About Canonical




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