6 Reference NFVI HW profiles and configurations
Table of Contents
- 6.1 Hardware Profile and Capabilities Model.
- 6.2 Compute Resource Configurations.
- 6.2.1 Compute Acceleration Hardware Specifications
- 6.3 Network Resources Configurations.
- 6.3.1 NIC configurations
- 6.4 Storage Configurations.
- 6.5 Security Configuration.
The support of a variety of different workload types, each with different (sometimes conflicting) compute, storage and network characteristics, including accelerations and optimizations, drives the need to aggregate these characteristics as a hardware (host) profile and capabilities. A host profile is essentially a “personality” assigned to a compute host (physical server, also known as compute host, host, node or pServer). The host profiles and related capabilities consist of the intrinsic compute host capabilities (such as #CPUs (sockets), # of cores/CPU, RAM, local disks and their capacity, etc.), and capabilities enabled in hardware/BIOS, specialised hardware (such as accelerators), the underlay networking and storage.
This chapter defines a simplified host, host profile and related capabilities model associated with each of the different NFVI hardware profile and related capabilities; some of these profiles and capability parameters are shown in Figure 6-1.
Figure 6-1: NFVI hardware profiles and host associated capabilities.
6.1 Hardware Profile and Capabilities Model
The host profile model and configuration parameters (hereafter for simplicity simply "host profile") will be utilized in the Reference Architecture to define different hardware profiles. The host profiles can be considered to be the set of EPA-related (Enhanced Performance Awareness) configurations on NFVI resources.
Please note that in this chapter we shall not list all of the EPA-related configuration parameters.
A software profile (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) defines the characteristics of NFVI SW of which Virtual Machines (or Containers) will be deployed on. A many to many relationship exists between software profiles and host profiles. A given host can only be assigned a single host profile; a host profile can be assigned to multiple hosts. Different Cloud Service Providers (CSP) may utilize different naming standards for their host profiles.
The following naming convention is used in this document:
<host profile name>:: <”hp”><numeral host profile sequence #>
When a software profile is associated with a host profile, a qualified name can be used as specified below. For Example: for software profile “n” (network intensive) the above host profile name would be “n-hp1”.
<qualified host profile>:: <software profile><”-“><”hp”><numeral host profile sequence #>
Figure 6-2: Generic Hardware Profile, Software Flavour, Physical server relationship.
Figure 6-2 shows a simplistic depiction of the relationship between Hardware profile, Software Profile, Physical server, and virtual compute. In the diagram the resource pool, a logical construct, depicts all physical hosts that have been configured as per a given host profile; there is one resource pool for each hardware profile.
Please note resource pools are not OpenStack host aggregates.
The host profile and capabilities include: 1. # of CPUs (sockets): is the #of CPUs installed on the physical server. 1. # of cores/CPU: is the number of cores on each of the CPUs of the physical server. 1. RAM (GB): is the amount of RAM installed on the pysical server. 1. Local Disk Capacity: is the # of local disks and teh capacity of the disks installed on the physical server. 1. HT (Hyper Threading; technically, SMT: Simultaneous Multithreading): Enabled on all physical servers. Gets 2 hyper threads per physical core. Always ON. Configured in the host (BIOS). 1. NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access): Indicates that vCPU will be on a Socket that is aligned with the associated NIC card and memory. Important for performance optimized VNFs. Configured in the host (BIOS). 1. SR-IOV (Single-Root Input/Output Virtualisation): Configure PCIe ports to support SR-IOV. 1. smartNIC (aka Intelligent Server Adaptors): Accelerated virtual switch using smartNIC 1. Cryptography Accelerators: such as AES-NI, SIMD/AVX, QAT. 1. Security features: such as TRusted Platform Module (TPM).
The following model, Figure 6-3, depicts the essential characteristics of a host that are of interest in specifying a host profile. The host (physical server) is composed of compute, network and storage resources. The compute resources are composed of physical CPUs (aka CPU sockets or sockets) and memory (RAM). The network resources and storage resources are similarly modelled.
Figure 6-3: Generic model of a compute host for use in Host Profile configurations.
The hardware (host) profile properties are specified in the following sub-sections. The following diagram (Figure 6-4) pictorially represents a high-level abstraction of a physical server (host).
Figure 6-4: Generic model of a compute host for use in Host Profile configurations.
The configurations specified in here will be utilized in specifying the actual hardware profile configurations for each of the NFVI hardware profile types depicted in Figure 6-1.
6.2 Compute Resource Configurations
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.cpu.cfg.001 | Number of CPU (Sockets) | This determines the number of CPU sockets exist within each platform | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| nfvi.hw.cpu.cfg.002 | Number of Cores per CPU | This determines the number of cores needed per each CPU. | 20 | 20 | 20 |
| nfvi.hw.cpu.cfg.003 | NUMA | N | Y | Y | |
| nfvi.hw.cpu.cfg.004 | Hyperthreading (HT) | Y | Y | Y |
Table 6-1: Minimum Compute resources configuration parameters.
6.2.1 Compute Acceleration Hardware Specifications
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.cac.cfg.001 | GPU | GPU | N | N | Y |
Table 6-2: Compute acceleration configuration specifications.
6.3. Network Resources Configurations
6.3.1 NIC configurations
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.nic.cfg.001 | NIC Ports | Total Number of NIC Ports available in the platform | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| nfvi.hw.nic.cfg.002 | Port Speed | Port speed specified in Gbps | 10 | 25 | 25 |
Table 6-3: Minimum NIC configuration specification.
6.3.2. PCIe Configurations
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.pci.cfg.001 | PCIe slots | Number of PCIe slots available in the platform | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| nfvi.hw.pci.cfg.002 | PCIe speed | Gen 3 | Gen 3 | Gen 3 | |
| nfvi.hw.pci.cfg.003 | PCIe Lanes | 8 | 8 | 8 |
Table 6-4: PCIe configuration specification.
6.3.3 Network Acceleration Configurations
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.nac.cfg.001 | Cryptographic Acceleration | IPSec, Crypto | |||
| nfvi.hw.nac.cfg.002 | SmartNIC | A SmartNIC that is used to offload vSwitch functionality to hardware | Maybe | Maybe | |
| nfvi.hw.nac.cfg.003 | Compression |
Table 6-6: Network acceleration configuration specification.
6.4. Storage Configurations
| Reference | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.stg.hdd.cfg.001* | Local Storage HDD | ||||
| nfvi.hw.stg.ssd.cfg.002* | Local Storage SSD | Recommended | Recommended | Recommended |
Table 6-7: Storage configuration specification.
*This specified local storage configurations including # and capacity of storage drives.
6.5. Security Configuration
| Reference* | Feature | Description | Basic Type | Network Intensive | Compute Intensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nfvi.hw.sec.cfg.001 | TPM | Platform must have Trusted Platform Module. | Y | Y | Y |
Table 6-8: Security configuration specification.