Requirements

  1. A (Virtual) Machine using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. MongoDB and Redis, working and configured, are needed.

  2. Performance requirements: The NFVCL is not a software that requires high performance, for a VM is more than enough 2VCPUs, 4GB of RAM and 15GB of disk. The requirements inside Docker and K8S still have to be evaluated.

  3. Deploy requirements: The NFVCL at the moment is supporting 2 types of Hypervisors on which it can work: OpenStack and Proxmox. At least one hypervisor, and access to it, is needed by the NFVCL to deploy Blueprints. To fully automate the deployment process a full access to the hypervisor is required, if this is not the case some operations may fail due to insufficient permissions (image creations, disable port security…)

  4. Network access to Internet or at least to images.tnt-lab.unige.it and registry.tnt-lab.unige.it to download VM and Container images required by Blueprints

  5. Network access to deployed VMs and to K8S clusters to configure resources deployed using Blueprints.

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Setup

The first step to run the software locally is to clone the repository. We have 3 main different branches:

  • The stable one, updated less frequently but should not include unstable features.

  • The master is updated as soon as a cycle of improvements has been made and partially tested

  • The dev branch is the one updated as soon as new features/fix are implemented. It is the branch used for development.

Clone the desired branch to your desired folder:

git clone https://github.com/s2n-cnit/nfvcl-ng
git switch stable

Install

Enter NFVCL folder and run setup.sh, this script will:

  • Install uvicorn, uv, Redis and MongoDB.

  • Configure Redis to listen from all interfaces

  • Install dependencies using uv

cd nfvcl-ng
chmod +x ./setup.sh
./setup.sh

Configuration - Local

See the Configuration section for more information.

Running 🏃

You can use screen or create a service to run the NFVCL in the background

Using Screen

Once configuration is done you can run the NFVCL in the background using screen.

:warning: It may be necessary to use the absolute path ‘/home/ubuntu/.local/bin/uv’ for running the NFVCL.

screen -S nfvcl
uv run python -m nfvcl_rest

:warning: To detach from screen press CTRL+a then d. To resume the screen run screen -r nfvcl.

Using a service

Create a service file: sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/nfvcl.service with the following content

:warning: Change the values in case you performed a custom installation

[Unit]
Description=Example service
After=network.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=0

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu/nfvcl-ng
Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=10
User=ubuntu
ExecStart=/home/ubuntu/.local/bin/uv run python -m nfvcl_rest

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start nfvcl.service

Check the status of the service and, in case it’s everything ok, enable the service.

sudo systemctl status nfvcl.service
sudo systemctl enable nfvcl.service

To see the logs of the service run:

journalctl -u nfvcl

Log file

The file can be found in the logs folder of NFVCL, it’s called nfvcl.log. It is a rotating log with 4 backup files that are rotated when the main one reach 50Kbytes. In case of NFVCL crash it is the only place where you can observe it’s output.