Infrastructure Overview (INF)

This project is a reference implementation of O-Cloud infrastructure and it implements a real time platform (rtp) to deploy the O-CU and O-DU.

In O-RAN architecture, the O-DU and O-CU could have different deployed scenarios. The could be container based or VM based, which will be both supported in the release. In general the performance sensitive parts of the 5G stack require real time platform, especially for O-DU, the L1 and L2 are requiring the real time feature, the platform should support the Preemptive Scheduling feature.

Following requirements are going to address the container based solution:

  1. Support the real time kernel

  2. Support Node Feature Discovery

  3. Support CPU Affinity and Isolation

  4. Support Dynamic HugePages Allocation

And for the network requirements, the following should be supported:

  1. Multiple Networking Interface

  2. High performance data plane including the DPDK based vswitch and PCI pass-through/SR-IOV.

O-Cloud Components

In this project, the following O-Cloud components and services are enabled:

  1. Fault Management

    • Framework for infrastructure services to raise and persist alarm and event data.

      • Set, clear and query customer alarms

      • Generate customer logs for significant events

    • Maintains an Active Alarm List

    • Provides REST API to query alarms and events, also available through SNMP traps

    • Support for alarm suppression

    • Operator alarms

      • On platform nodes and resources

      • On hosted virtual resources

    • Operator logs - Event List

      • Logging of sets/clears of alarms

      • Related to platform nodes and resources

      • Related to hosted virtual resources

  2. Configuration Management

    • Manages Installation and Commissioning

      • Auto-discover of new nodes

      • Full Infrastructure management

      • Manage installation parameters (i.e. console, root disks)

    • Nodal Configuration

      • Node role, role profiles

      • Core, memory (including huge page) assignments

      • Network Interfaces and storage assignments

    • Hardware Discovery

      • CPU/cores, SMT, processors, memory, huge pages

      • Storage, ports

      • GPUs, storage, Crypto/compression H/W

  3. Software Management

    • Manages Installation and Commissioning

      • Auto-discover of new nodes

      • Full Infrastructure management

      • Manage installation parameters (i.e. console, root disks)

    • Nodal Configuration

      • Node role, role profiles

      • Core, memory (including huge page) assignments

      • Network Interfaces and storage assignments

    • Hardware Discovery

      • CPU/cores, SMT, processors, memory, huge pages

      • Storage, ports

      • GPUs, storage, Crypto/compression H/W

  4. Host Management

    • Full life-cycle and availability management of the physical hosts

    • Detects and automatically handles host failures and initiates recovery

    • Monitoring and fault reporting for:

      • Cluster connectivity

      • Critical process failures

      • Resource utilization thresholds, interface states

      • H/W fault / sensors, host watchdog

      • Activity progress reporting

    • Interfaces with board management (BMC)

      • For out of band reset

      • Power-on/off

      • H/W sensor monitoring

  5. Service Management

    • Manages high availability of critical infrastructure and cluster services

      • Supports many redundancy models: N, or N+M

      • Active or passive monitoring of services

      • Allows for specifying the impact of a service failure and escalation policy

      • Automatically recovers failed services

    • Uses multiple messaging paths to avoid split-brain communication failures

      • Up to 3 independent communication paths

      • LAG can also be configured for multi-link protection of each path

      • Messages are authenticated using HMAC

      • SHA-512 if configured / enabled on an interface by-interface basis

  6. Support the ansible bootstrap to implement the zero touch provisioning

Enable the ansible configuration functions for infrastructure itself including the image installation and service configuration.

NOTE: These features leverage the StarlingX (www.starlingx.io). And in current release, these features are only avalaible for IA platform.

Multi OS and Deployment Configurations

  • The INF project supports Multi OS and currently the following OS are supported:

    • Debian 11 (bullseye)

    • CentOS 7

    • Yocto 2.7 (warrior)

A variety of deployment configuration options are supported:

  1. All-in-one Simplex

A single physical server providing all three cloud functions (controller, worker and storage).

  1. All-in-one Duplex

Two HA-protected physical servers, both running all three cloud functions (controller, worker and storage), optionally with up to 50 worker nodes added to the cluster.

  1. All-in-one Duplex + up to 50 worker nodes

Two HA-protected physical servers, both running all three cloud functions (controller, worker and storage), plus with up to 50 worker nodes added to the cluster.

  1. Standard with Storage Cluster on Controller Nodes

A two node HA controller + storage node cluster, managing up to 200 worker nodes.

  1. Standard with Storage Cluster on dedicated Storage Nodes

A two node HA controller node cluster with a 2-9 node Ceph storage cluster, managing up to 200 worker nodes.

  1. Distributed Cloud

Distributed Cloud configuration supports an edge computing solution by providing central management and orchestration for a geographically distributed network of StarlingX systems.

NOTE:

  • For Debian and CentOS based image, all the above deployment configuration are supported.

  • For Yocto Based image, only deployment 1 - 3 are supported, and only container based solution is supported, VM based is not supprted yet.

About Yocto and OpenEmbedded

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded and IOT products, regardless of the hardware architecture.

OpenEmbedded is a build automation framework and cross-compile environment used to create Linux distributions for embedded devices. The OpenEmbedded framework is developed by the OpenEmbedded community, which was formally established in 2003. OpenEmbedded is the recommended build system of the Yocto Project, which is a Linux Foundation workgroup that assists commercial companies in the development of Linux-based systems for embedded products.

About StarlingX

StarlingX is a complete cloud infrastructure software stack for the edge used by the most demanding applications in industrial IOT, telecom, video delivery and other ultra-low latency use cases. With deterministic low latency required by edge applications, and tools that make distributed edge manageable, StarlingX provides a container-based infrastructure for edge implementations in scalable solutions that is ready for production now.

Contact info

If you need support or add new features/components, please feel free to contact the following: