P4-based VNF and Micro-VNF Chaining for Servers With Intelligent Server Adapters
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The document presents an overview of virtualized network functions (VNFs) and micro-VNFs, highlighting the use of P4 and SmartNICs for efficient data handling. It details a design and demo showcasing VNF chaining, payload scanning, and statistical reporting through custom tunneling. The conclusion emphasizes the flexibility of P4 for VNF processing and provides resources for further exploration.
P4-based VNF and Micro-VNF Chaining for Servers With Intelligent Server Adapters
- 1. 1©2016 Open-NFP P4-based VNF and Micro-VNF chaining for servers with SmartNICs David George david.george@netronome.com
- 2. 2©2016 Open-NFP Session Agenda ● Introduction ● Design overview ● A look under the hood – P4, SandboxC and rules ● Run-through – Demo of key features ● Conclusions + questions ● (time permitting) A quick overview of SDK6 P4 runtime
- 3. 3©2016 Open-NFP Introduction ● VNF – Virtualized Network Function – Network function hosted independent of physical hardware ● examples: Firewall, intrusion detection – Chaining a sequence of VNF ● Micro-VNF? – Light-weight VNF – Possible to integrate close to dataplane ● e.g in kernel, on smartNIC – examples: telemetry, statistics ● Goal to illustrate how this can be achieved: – SmartNIC P4 dataplane using Netronome SDK 6 – Micro-VNFs in sandbox C – Simple VNFs with libvirt + VFIO – Other ‘neat’ P4 stuff ● Why this example? – Illustrates how simple it can be to solve challenging problems with P4 + SmartNICs: ● Marshalling data into VNFs ● Gathering telemetry info + processing statistics –
- 4. 4©2016 Open-NFP Design/Demo Overview X86 Host Micro-VNFs: Payload scan Hoptime stats Linux Net Namespace VLAN 2 “dumb” NIC + bridge Physical Interface TCP path with metering Netronome SmartNIC with P4+C Dataplane VNF0: NetDev L2 Bridge in VM VFIO 1 VNF1: DPDK L2 Bridge in VM VFIO 0 VFIO 3 VFIO 2 Linux Net Namespace VLAN3
- 5. 5©2016 Open-NFP Design/Demo Overview (cont.) ● P4 Dataplane – Run-of-the-mill parse + match + action + forwarding ● VNFs: L2 Forwarding “cooked two ways” DPDK and NetDev – Simple way to illustrate use – BUT complicated routing: ● Must be unique per port direction! ● MicroVNFs: – VF “Hoptime” statistics ● Min, max, avg reported between VF send + receive ● Achieved using custom tunnel – Simple payload scanner: search for a compile time token ● Extra points of interest – Meters ● Traffic generation: – VLAN IDs used for routing between VFs – Linux Network Namespaces to isolate address spaces (all on one host)
- 6. 6©2016 Open-NFP Traffic Generation X86 Host Micro-VNFs: Payload scan Hoptime stats Linux Net Namespace VLAN 2 “dumb” NIC + bridge Physical Interface TCP path with metering Netronome SmartNIC with P4+C Dataplane VNF0: NetDev L2 Bridge in VM VFIO 1 VNF1: DPDK L2 Bridge in VM VFIO 0 VFIO 3 VFIO 2 Linux Net Namespace VLAN3
- 7. 7©2016 Open-NFP Coarse look at P4 design Parsing Ethernet VLAN Custom “hoptime” header IP + TCP Ingress Process “hoptime” Metering Forwarding Egress Insert “hoptime” Translate VLAN Tags
- 8. 8©2016 Open-NFP A look under the hood + demo:
- 9. 9©2016 Open-NFP Conclusions ● Illustrated simple solution for VNF chaining using P4 ● Showed the potential for implementing Micro-VNFs in C sandbox – Support for going beyond the P4 parsed headers in C – Measurement of VNF processing time ● Showed how flexibly P4 meters can be used
- 10. 10©2016 Open-NFP Github Resources ● https://github.com/open-nfpsw/p4_vnf_uvnf_demo ● Includes: ● P4 , sandbox C & P4 configs – Building & loading using CLI or PS IDE ● Host scripts
- 12. 12©2016 Open-NFP SDK P4 Runtime Environment ● Typically programmer studio drives the configuration – Hitting “debug” programs firmware, load rules, configures meters etc. ● The RTE ships with python tools and thrift interface for interacting with P4 Runtime Environment Server via Thrift RPC – Allows command line driven loading configuration – Possible to build a stand-alone application for interacting with design ● Example: L2 bridge receiving P4 digests and writing table updates
- 13. 13©2016 Open-NFP SDK P4 Runtime Environment (cont) ● in RTE installation you will find the following: – thrift/sdk6_rte.thrift ● Thrift interface file, RPC stubs generated from this and can be used with python, C++... – thrift/client/RTEInterface.py ● A python module that provides an abstraction for the Thrift interface – thrift/client/sdk6_rte_cli.py ● A swiss army knife command line tool – thrift/client/digest_listener ● Example tool for dumping digest events