NFV Platform Software Toolkit

The NPS toolkit is a purpose-built, optional, software package designed to automate, install, and configure the Telco Blueprint. The NPS toolkit software has been enhanced to enable deployment on a remote host. You can now deploy the NPS toolkit package on a NPS toolkit VM, that is hosted on a remote machine (such as a laptop), which can then be connected to the rack that is being configured for the blueprint deployment. The NPS toolkit VM must have one of its interfaces connected to the customer network such that it can access the Telco Blueprint rack to be set up.

The block diagram of NPS toolkit shows the various microservices:

The functions of the microservices are described as follows:

  • Server and Storage Microservice: Redfish-based micorservice is developed to configure the BOOT, BIOS, RAID, and NIC with customizable parameters using hardware profiles. This microservice comes packaged with default hardware profiles, such as:
    • default_management_profile for Management Pod

    • default_edge_resource_profile for Resource and Edge Pods

    This microservice also enables you to create custom hardware profile containing the boot sequence, BIOS, NIC, and RAID parameters. Ensure that these parameters are supported by DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) Redfish.

  • Networking Microservice: NETCONF-based microservice is developed for HPE FlexFabric switches to configure the ports, VLANs, VxLAN, trunks, and bonds that are required for the cloud platform. The profiles are also developed to allow customization based on the networking topologies. Similarly, a Cumulus-based microservice is developed to support white box-based switches (such as M-Series Mellanox switches running Cumulus NOS). The microservice comes packaged with default switch profiles such as 2100_core_vmware.

    For VMware, 2100_core_vmware is used as the default profile.

  • VIM Microservice: VIM microservice has been developed to automate the deployment of complete VMware vCloud NFV OpenStack.

  • iLO DHCP Agent Microservice: This microservice is used to configure DHCP server on a management switch that facilitates the automatic iLO-OOBM IP address allocation for all the servers. It is an optional microservice. For more information on enabling DHCP, see Enabling DHCP service.

  • Image service: Image service is a method of installing and configuring a baremetal as management and resource hosts.