OpenNebula Enhanced Platform Awareness - White Paper

Network functions, like wireless nodes, Broadband Network Gateways (BNG), routers, firewalls, etc., have traditionally been delivered in dedicated hardware appliances. Virtual Network Functions (VNF) are now emerging to replace that hardware-centric approach through software appliances that provide more agility, flexibility, simplicity, efficiency, and scalability than legacy infrastructure, while also reducing costs and allowing greater innovation.

The implementation of the Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) features in OpenNebula enables the fine-grained matching of processor capabilities to Virtual Machine (VM) and Kubernetes workloads prior to launching the applications. The implementation of EPA allows OpenNebula to improve the VM packet forwarding performance (throughput, latency, jitter) by exposing low-level CPU and NIC acceleration components to the VNF. Besides network performance, OpenNebula provides the GPU support, bare-metal automation and multi-cluster features needed to address edge and Telco use cases such as distributed User Plane Function (UPF) in 5G Core, CDN or O-RAN.

This white paper presents the current capabilities of OpenNebula to address the requirements for NFV deployments.