OpenANFV: Accelerating Network Function Virtualization with a Consolidated Framework in Openstack

The resources of dedicated accelerators (e.g. FPGA) are still required to bridge the gap between software-based Middleboxs(MBs) and the commodity hardware. To consolidate various hardware resources in an elastic, programmable and reconfigurable manner, we design and build a flexible and consolidated framework, OpenANFV, to support virtualized accelerators for MBs in the cloud environment. OpenANFV is seamlessly and efficiently put into Openstack to provide high performance on top of commodity hardware to cope with various virtual function requirements. OpenANFV works as an independent component to manage and virtualize the acceleration resources (e.g. cinder manages block storage resources and nova manages computing resources). Specially, OpenANFV mainly has the following three features. (1)Automated Management. Provisioning for multiple Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) is automated to meet the dynamic requirements of NFV environment. Such automation alleviates the time pressure of the complicated provisioning and configuration as well as reduces the probability of manually induced configuration errors. (2) Elasticity. VNFs are created, migrated, and destroyed on demand in real time. The reconfigurable hardware resources in pool can rapidly and flexibly offload the corresponding services to the accelerator platform in the dynamic NFV environment. (3) Coordinating with Openstack. The design and implementation of the OpenANFV APIs coordinate with the mechanisms in Openstack to support required virtualized MBs for multiple tenants.