OPNFV and OVS, with Dave Neary from Red Hat

OVS Orbit

Interview with Dave Neary of Red Hat, concerning OPNFV and its relationship with Open vSwitch.

Topics include:

• The difference between SFC and NFV.
• Importance performance constraints in NFV.
• Telcos and NFV, and how telcos approached OpenStack.
• How OPNFV bridges the telcos with OpenStack.
• What telcos care about, and a definition of “carrier grade.”
• Why carrier-grade features matter to everyone.
• Downsides and tradeoffs of carrier grade, such as cost and complexity.
• Role of Open vSwitch in OPNFV, and why DPDK is important to NFV.
• Importance of short 64-byte packets in NFV, e.g. for RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol, for delivering audio and video across networks).
• Relationship between SIP and RTP.
• Status of DPDK datapath in OVS for OPNFV (still under OpenStack review and in early evaluation, not running in production much).
• Importance of vhost-user for NFV.
• Why DPDK API/ABI changes cause trouble for Open vSwitch and downstream users, and how symbol versioning in DPDK 2 and later helps.
• Problems caused by irregularly scheduled Open vSwitch 2.4 and 2.5 releases.
• Intent to branch OVS 2.6 in July.
• SFC for OPNFV demo with Tacker.
• Progress toward NSH support in OVS, and why OVS support for Geneve should make it easier now.
• Geneve standardization progress.
• OpenFlow matching for service chains.
• Potential pros and cons of NSH and Geneve for service chaining.
• VPP and OPNFV, and guesses at pros and cons of VPP versus OVS for different application.
• Why Dave is excited about OPNFV.

You can find Dave at @nearyd on Twitter.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro and bumper music is Electro Deluxe, featuring Gurdonack, copyright 2014 by My Free Mickey. The outro music is Girls like you, featuring Thespinwires, copyright 2014 by Stefan Kartenberg. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.