Some VNF suppliers make use of the underlying hardware platform capabilities in order to accelerate performance and optimize throughput of their VNF products. In order to ensure proper instantiation and operation of such VNFs, the VNF descriptor (VNFD) is used to describe VNF-specific hardware platform (HPA) capability requirements that will be matched against the capabilities of the underlying hardware infrastructure resources, in order to ensure that appropriate resources are used for instantiation.
HPA Requirement Key/Value Pair Entry Format
HPA capability requirements are specified using a set of kev/value pair arrays within the VNFD. There are five types of HPA capability requirements that can be specified using the VNFD - CPU, memory, storage, network and NUMA. Each requirement type is specified using a separate key-value pair array. Each entry in the array fully defines a single HPA capability.
The "key" portion of each array entry contains a string specifying a particular HPA capability name. The "value" portion of each array entry is a structured field containing information used to interpret the requested capability configuration.
| Array Entry | Values | ||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| <key> | A string specifying the name of a given HPA capability. | ||||||||||||||||||
| <value> | A list of key-value pairs describing the configuration value of a given capability, where the key-value pairs are defined as follows | ||||||||||||||||||
|
| HPA Requirements | Attribute Name | Defined in... | Used in... |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | vdu_cpu_requirements | tosca.datatypes.nfv.VirtualCpu | tosca.nodes.nfv.VDU.Compute |
| Memory | vdu_memory_requirements | tosca.datatypes.nfv.VirtualMemory | tosca.nodes.nfv.VDU.Compute |
| NIC | network_interface_requirements | tosca.datatypes.nfv.VirtualNetworkInterfaceRequirements | tosca.nodes.nfv.VduCp tosca.nodes.nfv.VnfExtCp |
| Storage | vdu_storage requirements | map | tosca.nodes.nfv.VDU.VirtualStorage |
| NUMA | logical_node_requirements | tosca.datatypes.nfv.LogicalNodeData | tosca.nodes.nfv.VDU.Compute |
CPU & Memory Requirements
Storage Requirements
NIC Requirements
NUMA Requirements
NUMA HPA requirements are specified using the logical_node property of the tosca.capabilities.nfv.VirtualCompute capability.