Intel vCMTS on Red Hat OpenShift Lab
Solution overview
As MSOs face increasing bandwidth demands, limited head-end space, an effort to reduce CapEx and OPEX, and the limitations or end of sale of appliance-based Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS), virtual CMTS (vCMTS) has emerged in recent years as the path forward to accomplish these goals and usher in the DOCSIS 4.0 age. These systems differ from traditional CMTS by using commodity x86-based servers to virtualize the DOCSIS processing components instead of having a dedicated appliance. As these new virtualized systems' performance differs based on the system's processing power, Intel has developed its Intel Reference vCMTS Dataplane to measure the DOCSIS MAC dataplane performance. As Operators continue to evolve their services, the industry is seeing a need to converge services and workloads, such as vCMTS, virtual broadband network gateways (vBNG), and virtual 5G packet cores onto a single platform, which is where Red Hat's OpenShift Cloud Platform (OCP) comes into play. It allows operators a unified experience managing the workloads, simplified upgrades and capacity expansion, and enhanced security to provide simplified operations, as opposed to having different systems for each workload.
Intel's Xeon 6 processors have enhanced features that can assist with the most processing-intensive aspects of the DOCSIS dataplane packet processing. Since DOCSIS is heavy with encryption for security, it uses a large portion of the CPU cycles of a packet, which can limit throughput. With Intel's 6th generation of Xeon processors, they offer two on-board Quick-Assist Technology (QAT) accelerators in each processor to aid with cryptography for encryption/decryption of DOCSIS packets, along with an increase in instructions per cycle (IPC) from architectural improvements. Since CPU cores get bound to service groups, processor density is also important, and Intel has released a range of processors using their E cores, which lack hyperthreading, but are made for applications where core density and power efficiency are required, such as for network function virtualization (NFV) scenarios.
This lab introduces the users to a deployment of the Intel vCMTS Reference Dataplane on Red Hat's OpenShift Cloud Platform (OCP). It also shows off different components of OCP's Web Terminal and uses Grafana to view the vCMTS Workloads' performance.