An international Telecommunications provider requires an Orchestration solution to perform a range of lifecycle and operational management functions.
The Challenge
One of our overseas customers has requested help with an orchestration solution, and had quite a list of requirements that this solution needed to address, including:
- Deploy and configure Juniper vSRX as vCPE (Virtual Customer Premises Equipment) on the customers Cloud (OpenStack)
- Create a Multiprotocol Label Switching Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (MPLS L2vPN) between the vCPE and routers in the data center
- Provision bandwidth-on-demand for the L2VPN tunnel, so the required bandwidth can be updated with zero down time
- Monitor the vCPE operational performance
- Auto healing vCPE in case of failure
- Autoscaling up/down depending on the load
In addition to their long list of requirements, being located overseas meant that we were required to operate remotely and across multiple time zones.
The Aptira Solution
In order to meet these specific requirements, Aptira proposed a solution based on the Cloudify Service Orchestrator product which has capabilities to provision both Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and Physical Network Functions (PNFs).
Using Cloudify, we were able to:
- Develop TOSCA templates to:
- Provision the vCPE (Juniper vSRX) on customer OpenStack Cloud
- Configure the Cisco switches and routers
- Create a L2VPN tunnel between the on-premise Cisco routers and vCPE (Juniper vSRX) present on the customers OpenStack Cloud
- Develop a custom Cloudify workflow to provision bandwidth on demand for MPLS L2vPN
- Implement TOSCA templates for auto-scaling and auto-healing vCPE
As the client did not have their own lab for us to test this solution on, and given the restrictions of operating remotely, we developed the solution in our own internal lab.
The Result
Having implemented the fully-configured Cloudify solution to meet the requirements above, the Telecommunications provider is now able to successfully provision vCPE (Juniper vSRX) on their OpenStack Cloud, as well as provision the PNF (Cisco router and switch) configuration in their data center. In addition to this, a L2vPN tunnel has been created between the vCPE and PNF.
We have tested the L2VPN in both Port mode and VLAN mode, and also tested multiple scenarios of a production environment, including bandwidth on demand, auto scale up/down and auto healing.
