[j-nsp] Service Activation Testing

[James Harrison]

On 22/09/2016 14:41, Joe Freeman wrote:
> I've been asked to put together a solution that allows us to do SAT on
> every new turnup. These are all Ethernet services.
> 
> I've been trying to figure out how to do it in the MX platform since that's
> what we predominately have in our CO's, but JTAC has recently told me that
> RFC2544 or Y.1564 service testing won't be available until 17.1 at the
> earliest, contrary to all the published documentation for 16.1.
> 
> What solutions have others used?

RFC2544 isn't great for non-lab testing - Y.1564 is the way to go
(unless you want to validate TCP throughput rather than or in addition
to L2/L3, in which case RFC6349 is the right tool). It's worth digging
into what you're actually looking to test and assure - CIR? EIR? Do you
need to prove burst characteristics, QoS/CoS etc? VLANs, multicast/IGMP?
Some of this will determine how you'll have to test.

Realistically there's a lot of kit out there for multiprotocol Ethernet
service assurance, and while the MXes can do TWAMP and such just fine
I'd be looking at dedicated hardware for Y.1564 et al. Apart from
anything else, having performance measurement endpoints/devices
dedicated to just that makes isolation of variables easier when
diagnosing performance faults and gives you a bit more flexibility in
how you deploy test endpoints.

For 1G and up, EXFO, Viavi and VeEX all have products worth looking at,
though only the former two have "service assurance" platforms
specifically aimed at turn-up testing (AFAIK - VeEX has a lot of stuff
in the HFC world, less so on pure Ethernet). Below 500M or so there's
more scope for cheap and cheerful options like perfSonar/iperf/bwctl and
friends, but I'd really avoid those if you can - we see a huge amount of
variation in test performance above even a few hundred megs.

-- 
Cheers,
James Harrison