Spirent Communications, a test and measurement company, announced its association with China Unicom to test NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) infrastructure.
Spirent has executed functional and performance tests jointly with China Unicom to address specific needs of NFV infrastructure (NFVi) and middleware using Spirent TestCenter network performance testing instrument and Spirent CloudStress, a web-based infrastructure validation application.
Spirent’s testing solution enables network equipment manufacturers, cloud and service providers to scale test lab operations, modernize test labs for employees or customers as a cloud-based service, or streamline continuous deployment when testing hybrid virtual network functions.
China Unicom Network Research Institute conducted tests on the functions, basic performance and network performance of virtualized middleware. The functional tests included support for virtual machine affinity and anti-affinity, control node failure recovery, high availability of virtual machines, virtual machine hot porting, and northbound transmission of failure alarms.
The basic performance tests included four scenarios – CPU testing, memory testing, storage testing and virtual machine interference testing. Network performance tests were mainly designed to verify DPDK-based software virtual switching technology (vSwitch).
China Unicom performed tests on data of the PCI-PassThrough technology for a group of NICs as a reference in comparing with DPDK performance results. The network performance tests were completed with a Spirent TestCenter chassis and the MX family 10G interface test modules.
China Unicom has used Spirent TestCenter to evaluate network performance metrics of vSwitch (DPDK 2.0), PCI-PassThrough and SR-IOV with different vCPU count configurations for 8 configuration modes with 6 testing scenarios in each mode.
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