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.
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.
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
VNF Manager:
Oversees lifecycle of VNF instances, including:
Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and NFV Infrastructure (NFVI):
Virtualized Infrastructure Manager – VNF Manager (Vi-Vnfm)
Orchestrator – Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (Or-Vi)