VMware vCloud® NFV™ OpenStack Edition 3.0 Release Notes | 10 JUL 2018

NOTE: These Release Notes do not provide the terms applicable to your license. Consult the VMware Product Guide and VMware End User License Agreement for the license metrics and other license terms applicable to your use of VMware vCloud NFV.

Check for additions and updates to these Release Notes.

What's in the Release Notes

These Release Notes apply to vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition 3.0 and cover the following topics:

What's New in this Release

vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition 3.0 is a major release and addresses the following themes:

Accelerated Performance

  • VMware NSX-T Data Center N-VDS. When used with vSphere 6.7, the NSX-T Data Center N-VDS supports a high-performance mode that is called Enhanced Data Path. With this mode, NSX-T Data Center provides a hypervisor-based virtual switch that is three to five times faster than the vSphere standard or distributed switches. N-VDS with Enhanced Data Path mode provides superior performance for both small and large packet sizes. This new capability is very popular in the NFV market where telecommunication operators want to have a high performance virtual switch without having to sacrifice any of the benefits of virtualization such as vMotion and Predictive DRS. The Enhanced Data Path mode implements some of the key DPDK techniques like Poll Mode Driver, Flow cache, and optimized packet copy. Some of the specific benefits of the Enhanced Data Path mode include:
    • Ease of Configuration. Easy allocation of compute resources to N-VDS for data-plane intensive workloads.
    • Automated NUMA Alignment: N-VDS (E) has an in-built function that automatically aligns the VNF processing cores, the PMD logical CPU cores, and the physical NIC on the same NUMA node. This automatic alignment delivers the best packet processing performance as there is no cross NUMA communication
    • Full vSphere Support. The underlying N-VDS supports key vSphere functionality like HA, vMotion, and DRS.
    • Linear Scale. Performance scales in a linear way as newer and higher capacity physical NICs are adopted by the industry. The N-VDS provides the flexibility to add additional logical CPU cores for PMD operation and exhibits a linear traffic increase with each additional logical CPU core.
  • Isolation of data plane workloads. Working together with the existing vSphere Distributed Switch, this also delivers separation and isolation of data plane workload management from control plane and management plane workloads.
  • Vertical NUMA alignment. Together with the improvements in vSphere 6.7 and the VIM support by VMware Integrated OpenStack Carrier Edition, the NFV stack also delivers full vertical NUMA alignment to enable reduced context switching at runtime for high performance Virtual Functions.
  • Performance features. The new network stack also delivers a number of features for improved performance, such as multi-tiered routing, bare-metal edges, HugePages support up to 1GB for high performance Translation Lookaside Buffers. 

Carrier Grade Networking and Security

  • VMware NSX-T Data Center. For the first time, vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition introduces the next generation networking stack, a completely rewritten network hypervisor – NSX-T Data Center, compared to its predecessor NSX for vSphere. The purpose of NSX-T Data Center is to address a much broader and evolving category of workloads that includes:
    • New Application Frameworks, Containers and PaaS platforms. With the Cloud Native Interface in NSX-T Data Center, full overlay support for container-based workloads through Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and PaaS platforms such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) are included.
    • Multi Cloud Workloads. With support for public clouds (such as VMC on AWS) and the ability to migrate workloads seamlessly across private vSphere based and public clouds.
    • Decoupling of NSX-T Data Center functionality from vCenter Server. This way, the network Hypervisor also delivers cloud scale performance through a distributed Control Plane Architecture.
  • New VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.2.4. You can now leverage the rich feature set available in NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2 for their management and control plane workloads, while leveraging the N-VDS Enhanced feature in NSX-T Data Center to achieve high data plane performance for VNF components.  The workloads can run on independent clusters connecting to the respective NSX Managers running concurrently under the same OpenStack instance.
  • Enhanced Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD). Delivers advanced convergence performance.
  • Micro-segmentation for all workloads (VMs and Containers). This way the hypervisor now delivers zero trust security for all workloads.

All of these are available while leveraging the time-tested features of vSphere such as vMotion, HA, and Fault Tolerance.

Intent-Based Assurance

  • Operations Management and Assurance Stack. The vRealize Operations Management Stack that includes vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight, and optional vRealize Network Insight now work with vRealize Orchestrator. It is included with vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus edition.
  • Policy based Assurance. This stack delivers advanced policy-based assurance management where customers can express deployment policies that segment workload placement based on licensing, resource management policies, and capacity policies and vCenter Server tags and Latency based Placement.
  • CPU-aware vMotion. Along with new features in vSphere 6.7, the system can now honor vMotion at a VM level to leverage advanced CPU capabilities based on CPU generations.
  • JIT 5 min Forecasts. With faster data collection and aggregation, the assurance stack of vCloud NFV delivers current analytics data for just in time forecasts and performance remediation.
  • vRealize Orchestrator workflows for closed-loop. vRealize Orchestrator is now more tightly integrated with the rest of the stack to enable closed-loop workflows for advanced performance remediation.
  • Scalable telemetry and rate limiter. In combination with NSX, VMware Integrated OpenStack Cerrier Edition delivers a telemetry solution at cloud scale with full rate limiting capabilities.

Open Standards

  • Upstream Queens Distribution of OpenStack. The VIM of vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition, VMware Integrated OpenStack Carrier Edition 5.0 is fully 2018.02 compliant with the default upstream Queens Distribution of OpenStack.
  • CNI Plug-in for Containers and MULTUS Support:  VMware Integrated OpenStack Carrier Edition 5.0 ships with a container plug-in to support standard Kubernetes based containers and delivers fully managed Kubernetes support. This comes with complete Intel based MULTUS container support.
  • Identity Federation. VMware Integrated OpenStack Carrier Edition 5.0 also delivers full identity federation through the VMware Identity Management solution and through full Keystone integration.

Components of vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition 3.0

Included in the vCloud NFV Hard Bundle

Mandatory Add-On Components (Not Part of the vCloud NFV Bundle, Additional License is Required)

Optional Add-On Components (Not Part of the vCloud NFV Bundle, Additional License is Required)

Validated Patches

  • VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.1.0.3
  • VMware vSphere Replication 8.1.0.3
  • VMware vRealize Log Insight 4.6.1
  • New VMware ESXi 6.7, Patch Release ESXi670-201808001, see KB 56534.
  • New VMware vCenter Server 6.7.0d, see VMware vCenter Server 6.7.0d Release Notes. 

Release Notes Change Log

This section describes updates to the Release Notes.

Date Change
11 SEP 2018
  • Added VMware VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2 to the list of components.
  • Added VMware ESXi 6.7, Patch Release ESXi670-201808001 to the Validated Patches section.
  • Added VMware vCenter Server 6.7.0d to the Validated Patches section.

Support Resources

To access product documentation and additional support resources, go to the VMware vCloud NFV Documentation page.

Resolved Issues

  • Platform Services Controller 6.7 HA configuration for Management vCenter Server in Green Field deployment with NSX-T Load Balancer 

    For more information see KB article 56584.

  • Platform Services Controller 6.7 HA configuration for Resource vCenter Server with NSX-T Load Balancer

    For more information see KB article 56575.

Known Issues

  • Creation of an instance by using large page size memory images might fail with an error

    Creation of an instance by using large page size memory images fails with error in nova.scheduler.utils.

    Workaround:

    1. Extract the OVA file (with extra-config parameters, such as Largepage size).
    2. If the OVA file contains VMDK, OVF, MF, and ISO files, delete the ISO from the extracted files.
    3. Deploy a virtual machine (without the ISO image file) directly on a host resource using the above VMDK and OVF files.
    4. Create a new OVA file by using the OVF Tool:
      ovftool --powerOffSource --allowExtraConfig --noSSLVerify "vi://host_username:host_password@host_ipaddr/vm_name_in_inventory" "VM name.ova"
      The OVA file that you created should not contain an ISO in it.
    5. Upload the newly created OVA as a new image into VIO.
    6. Boot an instance from the OVA image in VIO. 
  • You cannot enter 12 logical CPU cores even though the system has 12 available

    There is 1-1 mapping between logical CPU cores and physical NIC hardware queues. A maximum of 8 queues are supported on the physical NIC. So, maximum of 8 logical CPU cores are supported for each enhanced N-VDS. The GUI does not have a proper error message handling if you enter a number greater than 8.

  • Importing VMs from vSphere to VMware Integrated OpenStack might fail

    Importing VMs from vSphere to VMware Integrated OpenStack fails when the VMs have NSX-T Data Center backed connectivity. 

    1. In vSphere, locate the VM  that has the NSX-T Data Center backed connection.
    2. Use the OVF Tool to export the VM to an OVA file.
      Ovftool –allowExtraConfig “vi://<host username:password>@<host ip>/<vm name in inventory>” <target_vm_name>.ova
    3. In Horizon, import the OVA to the VMware Integrated OpenStack image repository.
    4. In the VMware Integrated OpenStack Horizon interface, launch an instance from this image.
    5. In the Launch wizard, select the target NSX-T Data Center network.
    6. Power on the instance from Horizon.
    7. Verify that the instance has obtained a valid IP and is powered on successfully.
  • ESXi vmkernel panic occurs when setting the TX/RX ring buffers to values that are not 32 aligned numbers

    ESXi vmkernel panic occurs when setting the TX/RX ring buffers to values that are not 32 aligned numbers

    Set 32 aligned values for the TX/RX ring buffers. 

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