On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

TL;DR

This paper analyzes and improves the management and instantiation of Unikernels in NFV environments, proposing a generic model and evaluating performance enhancements of open source Virtual Infrastructure Managers.

Contribution

It introduces a generic reference model for Unikernel management in VIMs and enhances existing open source VIMs to support Unikernels with faster instantiation.

Findings

Support for Unikernels reduces instantiation time

Tuned VIMs show improved performance metrics

Open source VIM extensions are publicly available

Abstract

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence.