Ensuring end-user quality in NFV-based infrastructure
Distributed NFV cloud nodes provide instant assessment of the
end-user experience EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Compute resources for virtual
network functions are becoming available not only inside data
centers, but also on mobile base stations, access network devices,
and dedicated rack nodes, providing cloud-in-a-box functionality.
This trend is being accelerated by network functions virtualization
(NFV), which can be implemented on cost-effective, general-purpose
computing platforms. For efficient service assurance and
troubleshooting in these distributed and virtualized environments,
it is recommended to utilize virtualized traffic generation and
measurement tools that eliminate field engineering tasks and save
substantial hardware expenditures, thereby potentially reducing
total cost by an order of magnitude. Offering such a toolbox,
Netrounds is easily deployed at any remote location through
ordinary NFV cloud orchestration. With minimal effort, and in just
a few minutes, any organization can initiate instant NFV service
chaining assurance or perform long-term, end-user quality
assessment and monitoring, all in line with relevant international
standards from ITU, IETF, and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).
Netrounds runs on Intel-based platforms that have the ability to
dramatically accelerate packet processing, virtualization, and
network function performance. INTRODUCTION Practically every IT
professional, including network engineers, has embraced
virtualization technologies these days. Network providers and
operators, as well as enterprise IT, are now discovering the great
benefits by virtualizing not only the actual servers in their data
centers, but also the whole infrastructure, including resources for
networking, storage, and compute. This is what NFV is all about.
NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) are expected to make life
easier and more efficient for network engineers by hiding the
underlying complexity through abstraction layers. However, network
complexity is still increasing exponentially, and problems that
negatively impact the way users experience services are still
likely to occur. Finding and fixing these problems is a challenge
that has to be addressed. No service provider wants to spend
resources on quality assurance and troubleshooting. But as long as
problems occur, these efforts are necessary to keep and develop the
business. So rather than completely cutting unwanted costs for
service quality assurance, a preferred option is to find solutions
that drastically reduce them. Netrounds enables substantial cost
savings, thanks to: Elimination of hardware costs by using
downloadable appliance software, suitable for NFV deployments
Reduction of manual tasks through built-in automation support
Enhancement of productivity from unparalleled ease of use Another
important trend on par with NFV and SDN is the increasing momentum
in the IT industry to use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) rather than
traditional on-premise software. The main drivers for SaaS have
been alleviation of internal staff for platform maintenance,
centralized management and access, and savings in up-front
investment costs. Virtual Network Function-as-a-Service, or VNFaaS,
is a use case identified by ETSI that combines Saas and virtual
network functions (VNFs). ETSI had enterprise customers in mind as
the actual end consumers of a VNF service, such as a virtual
firewall. Likewise, with Netrounds, it is now possible for network
operators themselves to become users and consumers of virtualized
network testing and monitoring as a service. When it comes to
professional service assurance and troubleshooting solutions
suitable for telecom environments, there have not been any SaaS
alternatives available on the market until Netrounds was launched.
Based on a subscription-based SaaS offering, Netrounds transforms
the test and measurement industry in the same way Salesforce.com
did for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions more than
10 years ago. THE CHALLENGE In order to reduce churn, operators
must deliver high service quality and performance to their
subscribers. Consequently, real-time network performance metrics
are needed to understand how quality demanding services such as
IPTV, video conferencing, and unified communications are
experienced by end users. One option for monitoring service level
is to use the five-minute aggregate performance statistics
available on network devices, but the output lacks granularity and
does not correlate well with the delivered service quality.
Alternatively, handheld or portable tools are better suited for
measuring the end-user experience; however, they are built on
custom hardware, making them very expensive and difficult to
distribute in large-scale deployments. In a virtualized network,
another complicating factor is the difficultly or possible
inability to attach physical hardware test devices to a virtual
switch. In addition, physical test devices are often tailored for a
single service, like IPTV, making complete assessment and
measurements of all offered services even more costly since
multiple hardware devices are needed at each location of interest.
Moreover, with handheld tools, there is a need for hands holding
them on-site, which can result in substantial travel and personnel
costs. Another consequence of the above is that it often takes
several weeks before problems are diagnosed and fixed, leading to
lower customer satisfaction and increased risk of churn. Therefore,
operators need affordable tools that can be deployed instantly at
strategic locations in their networks to quickly provide insights
into the quality of the end-user experience. SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Netrounds is a SaaS solution that provides IP network insight and
on-demand traffic generation capabilities through the use of
distributed x86 probe appliances and public cloud infrastructure
for central control and storage. These traffic-generating probe
appliances are suitable for bare metal machines as well as for
virtual hardware. Figure 1 shows an overview of Netrounds system
architecture. The components, labeled Netrounds Probe and Netrounds
NFV Probe in the orange boxes, are in fact identical machine
images. Figure 1. Overview of the Netrounds system architecture. By
downloading and launching one or several Netrounds probe machine
images on any x86 targets, a network engineer can quickly and
conveniently work through Netrounds' cloud-based GUI/portal to
remotely generate active test traffic to perform distributed
troubleshooting tests and even monitor quality proactively over
time (SLA monitoring). Traffic-generating probes can be located on
any physical or virtual Ethernet port in the network for
interactive testing in labs and during field trials with
in-production monitoring. The probe image is a remote-controlled
toolbox for network engineers. Tools included in the image support
Metro Ethernet Forum and ITU-T Y.1564 service activation tests, and
access security tests. There are also tools for IPTV MPEG analysis,
synthetic traffic generation of IPv4/IPv6, and a full stack SIP
implementation with both signaling and media streams. Netrounds
traffic-generating probes are purely software-based, making them
well suited as a VNF for test, measurement, and monitoring. Remote
control Active test trafc Live trafc monitoring SOLUTION DETAILS
Unlike traditional handheld devices and hardware network testing
tools, Netrounds is a complete system. This means it has multi-user
support, as well as a centralized server for providing a single
location to manage a large number of distributed measurement
probes, and to store and analyze measurement results. The
centralized server also provides a software repository for
automatic updates of all probes, thus alleviating internal IT staff
from having to manually maintain and upgrade the embedded software.
Netrounds uses public cloud infrastructure for hosting its
centralized servers; and as a result, the service is always
accessible regardless of location, as long as there is ordinary
Internet connectivity. The solution is based on a multi-tenant
model, which in turn allows for highly competitive pricing for
accessing the service. For security reasons, all probes utilize
encrypted communications for interacting with the server through a
firewall-friendly scheme. Netrounds and its relation to SDN and
NFVIn a completely virtualized world, there are no suitable
physical interfaces where traditional test and measurement devices
could be connected. Therefore, measurement devices implemented in
software are required instead of their traditional hardware
counterparts. As shown in the upper part of Figure 2, Netrounds NFV
probe appliances can interface directly to virtual switches
(vSwitch), such as Open vSwitch. Figure 2. Overall view of
Netrounds and how it relates to SDN and NFV. An orchestrator
component typically handles deployment of machine images onto
compute resources in the NFV infrastructure, as shown in green in
Figure 2. This orchestration is also responsible for launching
Netrounds NFV probe appliances at requested infrastructure
locations. Note that these locations could extend far beyond the
data center to include network devices with available NFV compute
resources, such as LTE base stations. Also shown in Figure 2,
configuration and provisioning of network connections between
virtual machines (VMs) or end hosts in an SDN environment are
normally done by incorporating an SDN controller, such as
OpenDaylight. The actual configuration of both physical and virtual
switches is carried out over standardized protocols such as
OpenFlow or NETCONF. In an SDN/NFV environment, a considerable
portion of the bits is shuffled directly between VMs and VNFs
without ever leaving the infrastructure. However, a real-world
deployment still relies on an underlying interconnecting physical
network built on hardware. Therefore, any test and monitoring
system must be capable of measuring across both virtual and
physical hardware domains. Figure 2 illustrates how Netrounds is a
solution that supports the combination of physical and virtual
deployments. Measuring inside the virtual domain (East-West) In
real-world scenarios, some traffic may never go to the outside
world. An example of this is East-West traffic flowing between
distributed back-office servers that handle the post-processing of
customer data. In this case, the performance of the vSwitch could
quickly become the critical factor if bandwidth requirements exceed
its capacity. The achieved performance and long-term behavior of
the traffic through the vSwitch (blue arrow in Figure 3) can be
measured using Netrounds probe appliances, which may be launched on
either the same or different hypervisors. The probes can request
and analyze performance metrics, like response times, from services
provided by other appliances in the same virtual domain (green
arrow). Figure 3. Measuring in the "East-West" direction between
VMs. Measuring across virtual and physical domains (North-South) In
many cases, traffic originates from end users (or clients) in the
physical world. To replicate this scenario, a combination of
physical and virtual probes is required, as illustrated in Figure
4. The physical probes could be attached either to aggregation
networks or close to the end user in the access. For instance, a
probe could be attached on the same aggregation switch that
connects to base stations or DSLAMs. Probes could also be connected
to unused switch ports of the top-of-rack (ToR) switches in the
data center. Regardless of actual deployment, the main purpose of
North-South measurements is to gain knowledge about the end-user
experience by measuring traffic traversing many different physical
network devices along with a potentially complex chain of various
virtual network functions, such as WAN accelerators, firewalls, and
deep packet inspection devices. The physical part could include
Internet core routers, peering routers, distribution switches, data
center aggregation switches, mobile backhaul networks, and even ToR
switches. Figure 4. Measuring in the "North-South" direction. Data
plane tests and measurements For the East-West or North-South
scenarios described previously, there are three different types of
data plane measurements that could be performed: 1. Generating
active synthetic traffic between probes Generating packets of
various size, frame rate and header content Hub and spoke or mesh
topologies High performance and reliable multi-stream generation of
TCP and UDP using IPv4 and IPv6, up to 10 Gbps Metrics for loss,
jitter, and one-way delay Useful for QoS validation and service
turn up testing according to ITU-T Y.1564 and Metro Ethernet Forum
2. Actively measuring real-world services Measuring like an end
user (from the end users perspective) Requesting content from IPTV
streaming servers for MPEG analysis Measuring uptime response times
and latencies of common services such as HTTP and DNS Initiating
sessions through SIP servers to measure signaling performance as
well as media quality (MOS) 3. Passively capturing and analyzing
traffic Remote traffic capturing on any probe interface, attached
to either physical or virtual switches Processing of packet capture
files in Wireshark Analysis and statistics of network traffic
content BUSINESS BENEFITS Netrounds is instantly deployed and easy
to use, and quickly helps solve IP network issues. Network
operators with NFV-based network infrastructure can start remote
troubleshooting within minutes, anywhere in the world. Automated
traffic generation for tests and diagnostics can be initiated
centrally, alleviating physical delivery of test equipment and
involvement of staff in the field. This instant troubleshooting can
reduce the time and cost to solve complicated customer issues by up
to 90 percent. Vendors of cloud infrastructures can easily
implement Netrounds as a powerful VNF in their NFV ecosystem to
improve the ability to test and monitor services, shorten time for
acceptance testing, and strengthen their portfolios. For end users,
Netrounds helps ensure their everyday connected lives go on without
any interruptions. In any unexpected situation, end users can rest
assured their service providers have the best tool available to
quickly find and fix any problem. SUMMARY Virtual network functions
are deployed in data centers, as well as in mobile base stations,
access network devices, and dedicated rack nodes that have spare
compute resources. For efficient service assurance and
troubleshooting in these distributed and virtual environments, it
is recommended to utilize virtualized test and measurement tools
that eliminate field engineering tasks and save substantial
hardware expenditures, thus potentially reducing total cost by an
order of magnitude. WHERE TO GET FROM HERE Do you remember the days
when it took enormous field efforts to initiate remote
troubleshooting and measurements of end-user experience? This is
now part of the history. Within just minutes, you are able to get
started with your own end-user quality assurance. Just navigate to
www.netrounds.com and signup for your own account and leave the
history behind. Netrounds offers a reliable traffic generation
capabilities and easy-to-use network quality assurance solution,
available from the cloud as a SaaS subscription.Netrounds helps
getting in-depth understanding of network performance and provides
actionable metrics on end-user experience. More than 170 network
operators, enterprises and consultants worldwide use Netrounds to
increase operational efficiency, reduce capital expenditures and
deliver high end-user experience Founded in 2007, Netrounds is
headquartered in Lule, Sweden, with offices in Boston, MA.
NETROUNDS SOLUTIONS AB Storgatan 7 972 38 LULE, SWEDEN Phone +46
920 420015 www.netrounds.com Copyright 2014, Netrounds. All rights
reserved. This document is issued to provide information only and
the content is subject to revision without notice due to continued
development. The product and services described are subject to
availability and change without notice.