Wrapping up the OPNFV Colorado release work in 2016, the OPNFV Plugfest and co-located Hackfest in December brought together 70 participations from 23 different organizations. The international group, traveling in from Asia, Europe, and North America, converged at the UNH InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), in Durham, NH for a full week of activities. Fueled by coffee, snacks, fancy chocolates (someone brought from afar), and more coffee, participants spent the week running tests and various deployment scenarios, working with on and off-site hardware and the development teams. The testing focused on two key areas: 1) deployment testing with different hardware / software combinations, 2) Open-O integration with OPNFV. There were also some hackfest development and testing efforts: 1) multi-site deployment, and 2) enabling OPNFV Doctor. In all cases, teams of developers were able to identify bugs or enhancements to complete the task at hand, with the identified issues being reported as part of the Plugfest’s whitepaper. Rest assured, JIRA tickets have also been created and worked for each item as well!
Deployment testing combined on-site hardware resources from Huawei, Lenovo, and Nokia, and off-site resources from ENEA, Huawei, Intel, and NEC. The Lenovo and Nokia hardware based on the Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware designs, representing the first time this type of hardware had been tested at an OPNFV event (open source running on open hardware). While the OCP hardware isn’t specifically designed for OPNFV, it’s high density designs, with dedicated high-speed network interfaces, the designs align very well with the requirements for the NFV architectures. The teams worked together to deploy one or more of the OPNFV installers / scenarios on each set of hardware, and once completed, used OPNFV testing tools, such as Functest, Qtip, and StorePerf, to test the NFV platform (refer to the whitepaper for a full list of tested installer/scenarios and hardware combinations).
While the Plugfest participants were busy, Hackfest participants were no slackers either. The event schedules were packed, with project teams meeting throughout the week. Some of the “full room” discussions included the Colorado release retrospective, finalization of the Pharos pod descriptor file, and the cross community CI activities--specifically with the OpenDaylight and Open-O projects.
Looking to the Spring (and warmer weather), the date and location of the next OPNFV Plugfest & Hackfest have just been announced: April 24-28, in Paris, France at the Orange campus. With all the work completed at this event, the bar has been set high, but maybe we can create some additional motivation during the Plugfest with the promise of French wine at the end of the day. We hope to see many of you in Paris. In the meantime, please check out the full OPNFV Plugfest Report and let us know if you have any feedback, questions, or ideas.