1. Deployment Guide
This section walks you through the process of deploying TeraFlowSDN on top of a machine running MicroK8s Kubernetes platform. The guide includes the details on configuring and installing the machine, installing and configuring MicroK8s, and deploying and reporting the status of the TeraFlowSDN controller.
1.1. Configure your Machine
In this section, we describe how to configure a machine (physical or virtual) to be used as the deployment, execution, and development environment for the ETSI TeraFlowSDN controller. Choose your preferred environment below and follow the instructions provided.
NOTE: If you already have a remote physical server fitting the requirements specified in this section feel free to use it instead of deploying a local VM. Check 1.1.1. Physical Server for further details.
Virtualization platforms tested are:
1.1.1. Physical Server
This section describes how to configure a physical server for running ETSI TeraFlowSDN(TFS) controller.
Server Specifications
Minimum Server Specifications for development and basic deployment
- CPU: 4 cores
- RAM: 8 GB
- Disk: 60 GB
- 1 GbE NIC
Recommended Server Specifications for development and basic deployment
- CPU: 6 cores
- RAM: 12 GB
- Disk: 80 GB
- 1 GbE NIC
Server Specifications for best development and deployment experience
- CPU: 8 cores
- RAM: 32 GB
- Disk: 120 GB
- 1 GbE NIC
NOTE: the specifications listed above are provided as a reference. They depend also on the CPU clock frequency, the RAM memory, the disk technology and speed, etc.
For development purposes, it is recommended to run the VSCode IDE (or the IDE of your choice) in a more powerful server, for instance, the recommended server specifications for development and basic deployment.
Given that TeraFlowSDN follows a micro-services architecture, for the deployment, it might be better to use many clusterized servers with many slower cores than a single server with few highly performant cores.
Clusterized Deployment
You might consider creating a cluster of machines each featuring, at least, the minimum server specifications. That solution brings you scalability in the future.
Networking
No explicit indications are given in terms of networking besides that servers need access to the Internet for downloading dependencies, binaries, and packages while building and deploying the TeraFlowSDN components.
Besides that, the network requirements are essentially the same than that required for running a classical Kubernetes environment. To facilitate the deployment, we extensively use MicroK8s, thus the network requirements are, essentially, the same demanded by MicroK8s, especially, if you consider creating a Kubernetes cluster.
As a reference, the other deployment solutions based on VMs assume the VM is connected to a virtual network configured with the IP range 10.0.2.0/24 and have the gateway at IP 10.0.2.1. The VMs have the IP address 10.0.2.10.
The minimum required ports to be accessible are: - 22/SSH : for management purposes - 80/HTTP : for the TeraFlowSDN WebUI and Grafana dashboard - 8081/HTTPS : for the CockroachDB WebUI
Other ports might be required if you consider to deploy addons such as Kubernetes observability, etc. The details on these ports are left appart given they might vary depending on the Kubernetes environment you use.
Operating System
The recommended Operating System for deploying TeraFlowSDN is Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS. Other version might work, but we have not tested them. We strongly recommend using Long Term Support (LTS) versions as they provide better stability.
Below we provide some installation guidelines: - Installation Language: English - Autodetect your keyboard - If asked, select "Ubuntu Server" (do not select "Ubuntu Server (minimized)"). - Configure static network specifications (adapt them based on your particular setup):
| Interface | IPv4 Method | Subnet | Address | Gateway | Name servers | Search domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| enp0s3 | Manual | 10.0.2.0/24 | 10.0.2.10 | 10.0.2.1 | 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 |
- Leave proxy and mirror addresses as they are
- Let the installer self-upgrade (if asked).
- Use an entire disk for the installation
- Disable setup of the disk as LVM group
- Double check that NO swap space is allocated in the partition table. Kubernetes does not work properly with SWAP.
- Configure your user and system names:
- User name:
TeraFlowSDN - Server's name:
tfs-vm - Username:
tfs - Password:
tfs123 - Install Open SSH Server
- Import SSH keys, if any.
- Featured Server Snaps
- Do not install featured server snaps. It will be done manually later to illustrate how to uninstall and reinstall them in case of trouble with.
- Let the system install and upgrade the packages.
- This operation might take some minutes depending on how old is the Optical Drive ISO image you use and your Internet connection speed.
- Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
Upgrade the Ubuntu distribution
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
- If asked to restart services, restart the default ones proposed.
- Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
1.1.2. Oracle Virtual Box
This section describes how to configure a VM for running ETSI TeraFlowSDN(TFS) controller using Oracle VirtualBox. It has been tested with VirtualBox up to version 6.1.40 r154048.
Create a NAT Network in VirtualBox
In "Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager", Menu "File > Preferences... > Network", create a NAT network with the following specifications:
| Name | CIDR | DHCP | IPv6 |
|---|---|---|---|
| TFS-NAT-Net | 10.0.2.0/24 | Disabled | Disabled |
Within the newly created "TFS-NAT-Net" NAT network, configure the following IPv4 forwarding rules:
| Name | Protocol | Host IP | Host Port | Guest IP | Guest Port |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SSH | TCP | 127.0.0.1 | 2200 | 10.0.2.10 | 22 |
| HTTP | TCP | 127.0.0.1 | 8080 | 10.0.2.10 | 80 |
Note: IP address 10.0.2.10 is the one that will be assigned to the VM.
Create VM in VirtualBox:
- Name: TFS-VM
- Type/Version: Linux / Ubuntu (64-bit)
- CPU (*): 4 vCPUs @ 100% execution capacity
- RAM: 8 GB
- Disk: 60 GB, Virtual Disk Image (VDI), Dynamically allocated
- Optical Drive ISO Image: "ubuntu-22.04.X-live-server-amd64.iso"
- Download the latest Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu Server image from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, e.g., "ubuntu-22.04.X-live-server-amd64.iso".
- Note: use Ubuntu Server image instead of Ubuntu Desktop to create a lightweight VM.
- Network Adapter 1 (*): enabled, attached to NAT Network "TFS-NAT-Net"
- Minor adjustments (*):
- Audio: disabled
- Boot order: disable "Floppy"
Note: (*) settings to be editing after the VM is created.
Install Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Operating System
In "Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager", start the VM in normal mode, and follow the installation procedure. Below we provide some installation guidelines: - Installation Language: English - Autodetect your keyboard - If asked, select "Ubuntu Server" (do not select "Ubuntu Server (minimized)"). - Configure static network specifications:
| Interface | IPv4 Method | Subnet | Address | Gateway | Name servers | Search domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| enp0s3 | Manual | 10.0.2.0/24 | 10.0.2.10 | 10.0.2.1 | 8.8.8.8,8.8.4.4 |
- Leave proxy and mirror addresses as they are
- Let the installer self-upgrade (if asked).
- Use an entire disk for the installation
- Disable setup of the disk as LVM group
- Double check that NO swap space is allocated in the partition table. Kubernetes does not work properly with SWAP.
- Configure your user and system names:
- User name: TeraFlowSDN
- Server's name: tfs-vm
- Username: tfs
- Password: tfs123
- Install Open SSH Server
- Import SSH keys, if any.
- Featured Server Snaps
- Do not install featured server snaps. It will be done manually later to illustrate how to uninstall and reinstall them in case of trouble with.
- Let the system install and upgrade the packages.
- This operation might take some minutes depending on how old is the Optical Drive ISO image you use and your Internet connection speed.
- Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
Upgrade the Ubuntu distribution
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
- If asked to restart services, restart the default ones proposed.
- Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
Install VirtualBox Guest Additions On VirtualBox Manager, open the VM main screen. If you are running the VM in headless mode, right click over the VM in the VirtualBox Manager window and click "Show". If a dialog informing about how to leave the interface of the VM is shown, confirm pressing "Switch" button. The interface of the VM should appear.
Click menu "Device > Insert Guest Additions CD image..."
On the VM terminal, type:
sudo apt-get install -y linux-headers-$(uname -r) build-essential dkms
# This command might take some minutes depending on your VM specs and your Internet access speed.
sudo mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/
cd /mnt/
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
# This command might take some minutes depending on your VM specs.
sudo reboot
1.1.3. VMWare Fusion
This section describes how to configure a VM for running ETSI TeraFlowSDN(TFS) controller using VMWare Fusion. It has been tested with VMWare Fusion version 12 and 13.
Create VM in VMWare Fusion:
In "VMWare Fusion" manager, create a new network from the "Settings/Network" menu.
- Unlock to make changes
- Press the + icon and create a new network
- Change the name to TFS-NAT-Net
- Check "Allow virtual machines on this network to connect to external network (NAT)"
- Do not check "Enable IPv6"
- Add port forwarding for HTTP and SSH
- Uncheck "Provide address on this network via DHCP"
Create a new VM an Ubuntu 22.04.1 ISO:
- Display Name: TeraFlowSDN
- Username: tfs
- Password: tfs123
On the next screen press "Customize Settings", save the VM and in "Settings" change: - Change to use 4 CPUs - Change to access 8 GB of RAM - Change disk to size 60 GB - Change the network interface to use the previously created TFS-NAT-Net
Run the VM to start the installation.
Install Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Operating System
The installation will be automatic, without any configuration required.
- Configure the guest IP, gateway and DNS:
Using the Network Settings for the wired connection, set the IP to 10.0.2.10, the mask to 255.255.255.0, the gateway to 10.0.2.2 and the DNS to 10.0.2.2.
- Disable and remove swap file:
$ sudo swapoff -a $ sudo rm /swapfile
Then you can remove or comment the /swapfile entry in /etc/fstab
- Install Open SSH Server
-
Import SSH keys, if any.
-
Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
Upgrade the Ubuntu distribution
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
1.1.4. OpenStack
This section describes how to configure a VM for running ETSI TeraFlowSDN(TFS) controller using OpenStack. It has been tested with OpenStack Kolla up to Yoga version.
Create a Security Group in OpenStack
In OpenStack, go to Project - Network - Security Groups - Create Security Group with name TFS
Add the following rules:
| Direction | Ether Type | IP Protocol | Port Range | Remote IP Prefix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ingress | IPv4 | TCP | 22 (SSH) | 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Ingress | IPv4 | TCP | 2200 | 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Ingress | IPv4 | TCP | 8080 | 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Ingress | IPv4 | TCP | 80 | 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Egress | IPv4 | Any | Any | 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Egress | IPv6 | Any | Any | ::/0 |
Note: The IP address will be assigned depending on the network you have configured inside OpenStack. This IP will have to be modified in TeraFlow configuration files which by default use IP 10.0.2.10
Create a flavour
From dashboard (Horizon)
Go to Admin - Compute - Flavors and press Create Flavor
- Name: TFS
- VCPUs: 4
- RAM (MB): 8192
- Root Disk (GB): 60
From CLI
openstack flavor create TFS --id auto --ram 8192 --disk 60 --vcpus 8
Create an instance in OpenStack:
- Instance name: TFS-VM
- Origin: [Ubuntu-22.04 cloud image] (https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/jammy/current/jammy-server-cloudimg-amd64.img)
- Create new volume: No
- Flavor: TFS
- Networks: extnet
- Security Groups: TFS
- Configuration: Include the following cloud-config
#cloud-config
# Modifies the password for the VM instance
username: ubuntu
password: <your-password>
chpasswd: { expire: False }
ssh_pwauth: True
Upgrade the Ubuntu distribution
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
- If asked to restart services, restart the default ones proposed.
- Restart the VM when the installation is completed.
1.1.5. Vagrant Box
1.2. Install MicroK8s
This section describes how to deploy the MicroK8s Kubernetes platform and configure it to be used with ETSI TeraFlowSDN controller. Besides, Docker is installed to build docker images for the ETSI TeraFlowSDN controller.
The steps described in this section might take some minutes depending on your internet connection speed and the resources assigned to your VM, or the specifications of your physical server.
To facilitate work, these steps are easier to be executed through an SSH connection, for instance using tools like PuTTY or MobaXterm.
Upgrade the Ubuntu distribution
Skip this step if you already did it during the creation of the VM.
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
Install prerequisites
sudo apt-get install -y ca-certificates curl gnupg lsb-release snapd jq
Install Docker CE
Install Docker CE and Docker BuildX plugin
sudo apt-get install -y docker.io docker-buildx
NOTE: Starting from Docker v23, Build architecture has been updated and docker build command entered into deprecation process in favor of the new docker buildx build command. Package docker-buildx provides the new docker buildx build command.
Add key "insecure-registries" with the private repository to the daemon configuration. It is done in two commands since sometimes read from and write to same file might cause trouble.
if [ -s /etc/docker/daemon.json ]; then cat /etc/docker/daemon.json; else echo '{}'; fi \
| jq 'if has("insecure-registries") then . else .+ {"insecure-registries": []} end' -- \
| jq '."insecure-registries" |= (.+ ["localhost:32000"] | unique)' -- \
| tee tmp.daemon.json
sudo mv tmp.daemon.json /etc/docker/daemon.json
sudo chown root:root /etc/docker/daemon.json
sudo chmod 600 /etc/docker/daemon.json
Restart the Docker daemon
sudo systemctl restart docker
Install MicroK8s
Important: Some TeraFlowSDN dependencies need to be executed on top of MicroK8s/Kubernetes v1.24. It is not guaranteed (by now) to run on newer versions.
# Install MicroK8s
sudo snap install microk8s --classic --channel=1.24/stable
# Create alias for command "microk8s.kubectl" to be usable as "kubectl"
sudo snap alias microk8s.kubectl kubectl
It is important to make sure that ufw will not interfere with the internal pod-to-pod
and pod-to-Internet traffic.
To do so, first check the status.
If ufw is active, use the following command to enable the communication.
# Verify status of ufw firewall
sudo ufw status
# If ufw is active, install following rules to enable access pod-to-pod and pod-to-internet
sudo ufw allow in on cni0 && sudo ufw allow out on cni0
sudo ufw default allow routed
NOTE: MicroK8s can be used to compose a Highly Available Kubernetes cluster enabling you to construct an environment combining the CPU, RAM and storage resources of multiple machines. If you are interested in this procedure, review the official instructions in How to build a highly available Kubernetes cluster with MicroK8s, in particular, the step Create a MicroK8s multi-node cluster.
References:
- The lightweight Kubernetes > Install MicroK8s
- Install a local Kubernetes with MicroK8s
- How to build a highly available Kubernetes cluster with MicroK8s
Add user to the docker and microk8s groups
It is important that your user has the permission to run docker and microk8s in the
terminal.
To allow this, you need to add your user to the docker and microk8s groups with the
following commands:
sudo usermod -a -G docker $USER
sudo usermod -a -G microk8s $USER
sudo chown -f -R $USER $HOME/.kube
sudo reboot
In case that you get trouble executing the following commands, might due to the .kube folder is not automatically provisioned into your home folder, you may follow the steps below:
mkdir -p $HOME/.kube
sudo chown -f -R $USER $HOME/.kube
microk8s config > $HOME/.kube/config
sudo reboot
Check status of Kubernetes and addons
To retrieve the status of Kubernetes once, run the following command:
microk8s.status --wait-ready
To retrieve the status of Kubernetes periodically (e.g., every 1 second), run the following command:
watch -n 1 microk8s.status --wait-ready
Check all resources in Kubernetes
To retrieve the status of the Kubernetes resources once, run the following command:
kubectl get all --all-namespaces
To retrieve the status of the Kubernetes resources periodically (e.g., every 1 second), run the following command:
watch -n 1 kubectl get all --all-namespaces
Enable addons
First, we need to enable the community plugins (maintained by third parties):
microk8s.enable community
The Addons to be enabled are:
- dns: enables resolving the pods and services by name
- helm3: required to install NATS
- hostpath-storage: enables providing storage for the pods (required by registry)
- ingress: deploys an ingress controller to expose the microservices outside Kubernetes
- registry: deploys a private registry for the TFS controller images
- linkerd: deploys the linkerd service mesh used for load balancing among replicas
- prometheus: set of tools that enable TFS observability through per-component instrumentation
- metrics-server: deploys the Kubernetes metrics server for API access to service metrics
microk8s.enable dns helm3 hostpath-storage ingress registry prometheus metrics-server linkerd
Important: Enabling some of the addons might take few minutes. Do not proceed with next steps until the addons are ready. Otherwise, the deployment might fail. To confirm everything is up and running: 1. Periodically Check the status of Kubernetes until you see the addons [dns, ha-cluster, helm3, hostpath-storage, ingress, linkerd, metrics-server, prometheus, registry, storage] in the enabled block. 2. Periodically Check Kubernetes resources until all pods are Ready and Running. 3. If it takes too long for the Pods to be ready, we observed that rebooting the machine may help.
Then, create aliases to make the commands easier to access:
sudo snap alias microk8s.helm3 helm3
sudo snap alias microk8s.linkerd linkerd
To validate that linkerd is working correctly, run:
linkerd check
To validate that the metrics-server is working correctly, run:
kubectl top pods --all-namespaces
and you should see a screen similar to the top command in Linux, showing the columns namespace, pod name, CPU (cores), and MEMORY (bytes).
In case pods are not starting, check information from pods logs. For example, linkerd is sensitive for proper /etc/resolv.conf syntax.
kubectl logs <podname> --namespace <namespace>
If the command shows an error message, also restarting the machine might help.
Stop, Restart, and Redeploy
Find below some additional commands you might need while you work with MicroK8s:
microk8s.stop # stop MicroK8s cluster (for instance, before power off your computer)
microk8s.start # start MicroK8s cluster
microk8s.reset # reset infrastructure to a clean state
If the following commands does not work to recover the MicroK8s cluster, you can redeploy it.
If you want to keep MicroK8s configuration, use:
sudo snap remove microk8s
If you need to completely drop MicroK8s and its complete configuration, use:
sudo snap remove microk8s --purge
sudo apt-get remove --purge docker.io docker-buildx
IMPORTANT: After uninstalling MicroK8s, it is convenient to reboot the computer (the VM if you work on a VM, or the physical computer if you use a physical computer). Otherwise, there are system configurations that are not correctly cleaned. Especially in what port forwarding and firewall rules matters.
After the reboot, redeploy as it is described in this section.