ONF is pleased to announce the release of VOLTHA v2.7 along with an updated ONOS release (v2.2.8). This release incorporates operator feedback and adds capabilities to meet the day-to-day operational requirements learned from the live production deployments of VOLTHA and ONOS at Deutsche Telekom (DT) and Türk Telekom (TT). Deployment feedback and tight collaboration with the operator continues to enable a tight loop of ever-increasing software quality and feature richness.
Netsia stepped up with great contributions on the ONOS front, delivering the capability to update ONOS apps with no impact to the dataplane for existing subscribers, thus allowing for bug fixes to be deployed on a live ONOS cluster controlling multiple VOLTHA stacks. This is the first time such upgrade functionality has been achieved on a running ONOS cluster, which required the extraction of a driver (olt pipeliner) from the ONOS core codebase, converting it into an external application. The extraction was contributed by ONF alongside the delivery of in-service upgrades for the VOLTHA components, again with no dataplane impact. ONF also implemented and carried out testing for this feature, which enabled identification of missing elements in the test suite such as MIB audit and synchronization in the openonu-adapter, and for these gaps to be subsequently implemented.
ONUs in the field also need software updates, and ADTRAN contributed the capability of doing so via OMCI through the openonu adapter. Kudos to the team for taking on such a major feature in only 3 months and making it (with a few late nights) into the release. A particular thanks also to TiBit for their contributions in omci-lib-go and to ONF for the BBSIM implementation, the simulator used for the automated test suites.
The ability to monitor production deployments led to further improvements, especially in the openonu adapter. Ciena enhanced the Alarm reporting capabilities while ONF significantly expanded the Performance Measurements in the system. These improvements required many involved discussions on units, representation and transformation of the captured values, demonstrating the importance of this feature. The analysis went from the top level events on the kafka bus, to low level byte ordering from different transceivers for captured PON rx/tx power values in the OLT. Security is always a topic of paramount importance in the VOLTHA community, and thus AES encryption for GEM ports was introduced thanks to Netsia; this feature is turned on by default.
The TST and the VOLTHA community always look at expanding support for different workflows and operator requirements. In the v2.7 release we have done so thanks to Furukawa Electric who contributed PPPoE support across the VOLTHA stack, together with an ONOS app. Furukawa also included EPON components to enable VOLTHA deployments in Asian markets.
My personal thanks to the test teams from ONF and ADTRAN that supported all the new features with the introduction of new functional and scale tests. These new tests proved their value by identifying a number of challenging bugs, such as a re-use of TCONT and Gem port IDs at scale. The issues were fixed by ONF before the release, thus further enhancing VOLTHA’s stability.
In this release we also introduced soak testing at ONF, which entails deploying the VOLTHA and ONOS software stacks and letting them run for several weeks to identify issues that develop over time. There are now over 180+ nightly hardware tests that validate the codebase and certify hardware products. With the VOLTHA v2.7 release, the following hardware targets have been recertified by ONF’s Continuous Certification Program:
- Edgecore ASFvOLT 16 XGSPON
- Edgecore ASGvOLT64 GPON OLT
- Edgecore AS6712 switch
- Edgecore AS7712 switch
- SERCOMM FG1000 GPON ONU
You can find more details about the v2.7 release in the VOLTHA v2.7 release notes.
VOLTHA v2.7 Techinar
ONF will be hosting a virtual VOLTHA v2.7 Techinar on April 14th at 9:00am PDT which will provide an in-depth view of the release and an opportunity for attendees to interact with project experts during a live Q&A. Register now to join us.
Finally, as you can see the amazing results and achievements of the VOLTHA v2.7 release would not have been possible without the contributions, expertise and dedication of the VOLTHA community and of the ONF partners, who put effort in all areas of the project. I can’t express my appreciation enough to the whole community. A special round of applause for the ONF team, who made great contributions to this release and worked hard to keep the project on a forward trajectory. This effort enabled seamless partner contributions through guidance and testing, and delivery of the v2.7 release as a coherent and complete package.
Andrea Campanella & the VOLTHA team
