On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Abstract

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence.

Benchmarking open source NFV MANO systems: OSM and ONAP

“…In this context the authors introduced the concept of "white-box testing", where measurements are made for each component in the ecosystem, which is in contrast to the "black-box testing" which is the common practice for benchmarking network devices. Another notable work in [9] compares the performance of three different VIM platforms, namely OpenStack [10], OpenVIM [11] and Nomad [12], in terms of the instantiation process of Virtual Machines(VMs). Another good work in [13] motivates the need for community-driven network service benchmarking.…”

Resource Management in Softwarized Networks

“…Unikernels are minimalistic OSs that are custom made to run only a single application, thus losing the bene t of being general purpose OSs. However, they have only a few megabytes of memory footprint and high deployment density (hundreds per physical machine) compared to traditional VMs or containers [119,151], hence, can be a potential choice for µNF deployment.…”

Software-Defined Multi-domain Tactical Networks: Foundations and Future Directions

“…13: Emerging concepts and challenges in QoS management [94] services to the users. In another work [92], the initiation time of different unikernelbased network services is optimized by consistently modifying their schedulers according to the service requirements. Although unikernels outperform VMs and containers in various aspects, the packet loss rate with unikernels is higher than others.…”