To better serve their customers, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are on the road to network functions virtualization (NFV). To achieve this goal, they will need to innovate to successfully create virtualized cloud-based networks.

As NFV World Congress commences in San Jose, CA, we are performing a series on NFV topics and how it will shape the future of network testing.

For this blog post, we are discussing the impact of any introduced or updated VNF or Network Service on the NFV Management and Orchestration, and why it is crucial that they should be tested before introduction.

What is Management and Orchestration?

Management and Orchestration (MANO) is the framework that evaluates all resources in the cloud data center, including computing, networking, storage and virtual machine (VM) resources, prior to Virtual Networking Functions (VNF) migration. This framework allows flexible on-boarding, and avoiding the hassles associated with the rapid ramp-up of network components.

How do we approach MANO?

So what would the acceptance process look like for MANO? The first step is to test the MANO architectural framework. The following key sections summarize the testing to be performed for each area.

NFV Orchestrator

  • On-boarding of new Network Service (NS) and VNF Packages
  • Set up a Network Service i.e. create a Network Service using the NS on-boarding artefacts
  • Query VNF – retrieve VNF instance state and attributes
  • Disable, enable, update, query, delete VNF package

VNF Manager:

Oversees lifecycle of VNF instances, including:

  • VNF instance software update/upgrade
  • VNF instance modification
  • VNF instance scaling out/in and up/down

Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and NFV Infrastructure (NFVI):

  • Resource catalog management
  • NFV Infrastructure faults collection and remediation
  • Create, delete, list, and query VM storage

Virtualized Infrastructure Manager – VNF Manager (Vi-Vnfm)

  • Resource allocation requests
  • Virtualized hardware resource configuration

Orchestrator – Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (Or-Vi)

  • Resource reservation and allocation
  • Virtualized hardware resource configuration