Tacker - NFV orchestration

“Tacker is an OpenStack service for NFV Orchestration with a general purpose VNF Manager to deploy and operate Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Network Services on an NFV Platform. It is based on ETSI MANO Architectural Framework.” For more details about Tacker, see OpenStack Tacker Documentation.

Overview

As of the Pike release, tacker requires the following services to be enabled to operate correctly.

  • Core compute stack (nova, neutron, glance, etc)

  • Heat

  • Mistral + Redis

  • Barbican (Required only for multinode)

Optionally tacker supports the following services and features.

  • Aodh

  • Ceilometer

  • Networking-sfc

  • Opendaylight

Preparation and Deployment

By default tacker and required services are disabled in the group_vars/all.yml file. In order to enable them, you need to edit the file /etc/kolla/globals.yml and set the following variables:

Note

Heat is enabled by default, ensure it is not disabled.

enable_tacker: "yes"
enable_barbican: "yes"
enable_mistral: "yes"
enable_redis: "yes"

Warning

Barbican is required in multinode deployments to share VIM fernet_keys. If not enabled, only one tacker-server host will have the keys on it and any request made to a different tacker-server will fail with a similar error as No such file or directory /etc/tacker/vim/fernet_keys

Warning

In Train, Tacker started using local filesystem to store VNF packages and CSAR files. Kolla Ansible provides no shared filesystem capabilities, hence only one instance of each Tacker service is deployed and all on the same host.

Deploy tacker and related services.

$ kolla-ansible deploy

Verification

Generate the credentials file.

$ kolla-ansible post-deploy

Source credentials file.

$ . /etc/kolla/admin-openrc.sh

In kolla-ansible git repository a tacker demo is present in kolla-ansible/contrib/demos/tacker/ that will create a very basic VNF from a cirros image in demo-net network.

Install python-tackerclient.

Note

Barbican, heat and mistral python clients are in tacker’s requirements and will be installed as dependency.

$ pip install python-tackerclient

Warning

You are free to use the following init-runonce script for demo purposes but note it does not have to be run in order to use your cloud. Depending on your customisations, it may not work, or it may conflict with the resources you want to create. You have been warned.

From kolla-ansible git repository, execute init-runonce and deploy-tacker-demo scripts to initialize the demo VNF creation.

$ ./tools/init-runonce
$ ./contrib/demos/tacker/deploy-tacker-demo

Tacker demo script will create sample VNF Descriptor (VNFD) file, then register a default VIM, create a tacker VNFD and finally deploy a VNF from the previously created VNFD.

After a few minutes, the tacker VNF is ACTIVE with a cirros instance running in nova and with its corresponding heat stack CREATION_COMPLETE.

Verify tacker VNF status is ACTIVE.

$ openstack vnf list

+--------------------------------------+------------------+-----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| ID                                   | Name             | Mgmt Url              | Status | VIM ID                               | VNFD ID                              |
+--------------------------------------+------------------+-----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| c52fcf99-101d-427b-8a2d-c9ef54af8b1d | kolla-sample-vnf | {"VDU1": "10.0.0.10"} | ACTIVE | eb3aa497-192c-4557-a9d7-1dff6874a8e6 | 27e8ea98-f1ff-4a40-a45c-e829e53b3c41 |
+--------------------------------------+------------------+-----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+

Verify nova instance status is ACTIVE.

$ openstack server list

+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+--------+--------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ID                                   | Name                                                  | Status | Networks           | Image  | Flavor                                                                                                                |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+--------+--------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| d2d59eeb-8526-4826-8f1b-c50b571395e2 | ta-cf99-101d-427b-8a2d-c9ef54af8b1d-VDU1-fchiv6saay7p | ACTIVE | demo-net=10.0.0.10 | cirros | tacker.vnfm.infra_drivers.openstack.openstack_OpenStack-c52fcf99-101d-427b-8a2d-c9ef54af8b1d-VDU1_flavor-yl4bzskwxdkn |
+--------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+--------+--------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Verify Heat stack status is CREATE_COMPLETE.

$ openstack stack list

+--------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------+--------------+
| ID                                   | Stack Name                                                                                   | Project                          | Stack Status    | Creation Time        | Updated Time |
+--------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------+--------------+
| 289a6686-70f6-4db7-aa10-ed169fe547a6 | tacker.vnfm.infra_drivers.openstack.openstack_OpenStack-c52fcf99-101d-427b-8a2d-c9ef54af8b1d | 1243948e59054aab83dbf2803e109b3f | CREATE_COMPLETE | 2017-08-23T09:49:50Z | None         |
+--------------------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------+--------------+

After the correct functionality of tacker is verified, tacker demo can be cleaned up executing cleanup-tacker script.

$ ./cleanup-tacker

Warning

The above does not clean up resources created by init-runonce.