The TUB/Fokus Testbed


The SoftFire Testbed node located at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin is realized as a slice of a much bigger Testbed that is used to benchmark virtual 5G core network functions, Figure 4. This includes a dedicated part (Tenant) of an OpenStack cluster to provide computing and storage resources. The connectivity to the distributed parts of the SoftFire Testbeds are realized by IPsec secured VPN links. The Fraunhofer FOKUS node is currently the center of the VPN network. It is realized as a pure virtual network that is feed as VLAN into the two Virtualization environments at FOKUS. The VPN encryption is handled by a virtual instance of an OpenBSD based Firewall running on a different VMware based virtualization cluster.

TUBFTestbed1

Figure FOKUS Testbed overview


OpenStack Cluster

The compute resources are provided by an OpenStack Liberty cluster installation that will be shared between different Projects to reduce the administration overhead to keep the Openstack components up to date. However, the SoftFIRE project is guaranteed a fixed slice of compute and storage capacity. The setup is based on one combined controller and networking host and currently three compute nodes. The used servers are manufactured by dell and are in the Blade form factor. Table 1 lists the details of the used server hardware. Storage Capacity is provided by a central Storage Array Network (SAN) manufactured by NetApp accessed via 10GBit Ethernet. The Servers are connected to several redundant networks that are used for management and storage access. Direct access to these networks if not possible from within the VM instances. Connectivity for the SoftFire VPN in realized as an external provider network that is dedicated to the SoftFire project.

Table . Fokus OpenStack Hardware

Type RAM CPU Storage
Controller Dell PowerEdge M630 128 GB 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz (8cores) 2x 200GB SSD RAID
Compute 1 Dell PowerEdge M630 128 GB 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz (8cores) 2x 200GB SSD RAID

NAS: 860 GB

Compute 2 Dell PowerEdge M630 128 GB 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz (8cores) 2x 200GB SSD RAID

NAS: 860 GB

Compute 3 Dell PowerEdge M630 128 GB 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz (8cores) 2x 200GB SSD RAID

NAS: 860 GB

 


VPN Hub

Interconnection between FOKUS and the other SoftFire Testbeds is provided by a virtualized IPsec VPN server. A OpenBSD based firewall was chosen because of the great flexibility in supported VPN and firewall settings that are needed to interconnect the different testbeds. The networks are completely isolated from the internal network if the Institute. Incoming and outgoing network traffic is filtered based on whitelists that allow previously agreed protocols. The VPN Hub is capable of forwarding traffic between different SoftFire networks at different Partners. However due to the limited internet bandwidth at Fraunhofer FOKUS these feature is enabled with reduced bandwidth. In a later phase the VPN hub is moved to the TUB that provides a much faster internet connectivity. The Second VPN Server located at TUB will provide OpenVPN services to registered Experimenters and IPSec interconnection to other Testbeds.