VNFFG Descriptor Template Guide

Overview

This document explains VNFFGD template structure and its various fields based on TOSCA standards V1.0 CSD 03.

The behavioural and deployment information of a VNFFG in Tacker is defined in a template known as VNFFG Descriptor (VNFFGD). The template is based on TOSCA standards and is written in YAML. It is on-boarded in a VNFFG catalog.

Each VNFFGD template will have below fields:

tosca_definitions_version:
   This defines the TOSCA definition version on which the template is based.
   The current version being tosca_simple_profile_for_nfv_1_0_0.

tosca_default_namespace:
   This is optional. It mentions default namespace which includes schema,
   types version etc.

description:
   A short description about the template.

metadata:
   template_name: A name to be given to the template.

topology_template:
   Describes the topology of the VNFFG under node_template field.
   node_template:
       Describes node types of a VNFFG.
       FP:
           Describes properties and path of a Forwarding Path.
   groups:
       Describes groupings of nodes that have an implied relationship.
       VNFFG:
           Describes properties and members of a VNF Forwarding Graph.

For examples, please refer sample VNFD templates available at GitHub.

Node types

For Tacker purposes a VNFFGD only includes Forwarding Path. In a full Network Services Descriptor (NSD), it would include information about each VNFD as well. However until that implementation, VNFD is described in a separate template. Only a single Forwarding Path is currently supported. node_templates is a child of topology_template.

Forwarding Path

Forwarding Path is a required entry in a VNFFGD. It describes the chain as well as the classifier that will eventually be created to form a path through a set of VNFs.

type:tosca.nodes.nfv.FP.Tacker
properties:Describes the properties of a FP. These include id (path ID), policy (traffic match policy to flow through the path), and path (chain of VNFs/Connection Points). A complete list of VNFFG properties currently supported by Tacker are listed here under properties section of tosca.nodes.nfv.FP.Tacker field.

Specifying FP properties

An example FP shown below:

node_templates:

  Forwarding_path1:
    type: tosca.nodes.nfv.FP.Tacker
    description: creates path (CP11->CP12->CP32)
    properties:
      id: 51
      policy:
        type: ACL
        criteria:
          - network_src_port_id: 640dfd77-c92b-45a3-b8fc-22712de480e1
          - destination_port_range: 80-1024
          - ip_proto: 6
          - ip_dst_prefix: 192.168.1.2/24
      path:
        - forwarder: VNF1
          capability: CP1
        - forwarder: VNF2
          capability: CP2

id

ID from the above example is used to identify the path. This path ID will be used in future implementations of Network Service Header (NSH) to identify paths via the Service Path Identifier (SPI) attribute.

policy

Policy defines the type of match policy that will be used to distinguish which traffic should enter this Forwarding Path. The only currently supported type is ACL (access-list). Please reference tosca.nfv.datatypes.aclType under properties section for more information on supported match criteria.

path

Path defines an ordered list of nodes to traverse in a Forwarding Path. Each node is really a logical port, which is defined in the path as a Connection Point (CP) belonging to a specific VNFD. It is not necessary at VNFFGD creation time to have predefined these VNFDs used in the path. They may be created later. Up to 2 CPs may be listed (in order) per VNFD. If 2 are listed, the first will be considered the ingress port for traffic and the second will be the egress. If only one port is provided, then it will be interpreted as both the ingress and egress port for traffic.

Groups

In Tacker and TOSCA, the VNFFG itself is described in this section. There may only be a single VNFFG described in each VNFFGD under this section.

VNFFG

VNFFG maps the Forwarding Path to other node types defined in the properties section.

type:tosca.groups.nfv.VNFFG
properties:Describes the properties of a VNFFG. These include vendor, version, dependent_virtual_link, connection_points, constituent_vnfs. . A complete list of VNFFG properties currently supported by Tacker are listed in TOSCA.
members:A list of Forwarding Paths which belong to this VNFFG. At the moment only one is supported.

Specifying VNFFG properties and members

An example VNFFG shown below:

groups:
  VNFFG1:
    type: tosca.groups.nfv.VNFFG
    description: HTTP to Corporate Net
    properties:
      vendor: tacker
      version: 1.0
      number_of_endpoints: 2
      dependent_virtual_link: [VL1,VL2,VL3]
      connection_point: [CP1,CP2]
      constituent_vnfs: [VNF1,VNF2]
    members: [Forwarding_path1]

number_of_endpoints

Number of CPs included in this VNFFG.

connection_point

List of Connection Points defined in the Forwarding Path.

constituent_vnfs

List of VNFD names used in this Forwarding Graph (also defined in Forwarding Path).

Summary

To summarize VNFFGD is written in YAML and describes a VNFFG topology. It is composed of a Forwarding Path and a VNFFG. A full VNFFGD is shown below:

tosca_definitions_version: tosca_simple_profile_for_nfv_1_0_0

  description: Sample VNFFG template

  topology_template:
    description: Sample VNFFG template

    node_templates:

      Forwarding_path1:
        type: tosca.nodes.nfv.FP.Tacker
        description: creates path (CP12->CP22)
        properties:
          id: 51
          policy:
            type: ACL
            criteria:
              - network_src_port_id: 640dfd77-c92b-45a3-b8fc-22712de480e1
              - destination_port_range: 80-1024
              - ip_proto: 6
              - ip_dst_prefix: 192.168.1.2/24
          path:
            - forwarder: VNFD1
              capability: CP12
            - forwarder: VNFD2
              capability: CP22

    groups:
      VNFFG1:
        type: tosca.groups.nfv.VNFFG
        description: HTTP to Corporate Net
        properties:
          vendor: tacker
          version: 1.0
          number_of_endpoints: 2
          dependent_virtual_link: [VL12,VL22]
          connection_point: [CP12,CP22]
          constituent_vnfs: [VNFD1,VNFD2]
        members: [Forwarding_path1]