NVO

NFV Orchestrator (NFVO)

The Network Function Virtualization Orchestration layer is responsible for reading the TOSCA Template from Mastero Layer and delegating Actions to the VNFM and VIM layer. The NFVO is completely designed and implemented according to ETSI specifications.Supports Multi Vendor integrated NFV PoP VIM’s including support for Azure, Openstack and vCenter. Maintains an overview on the NFV infrastructure, supporting dynamic registration of NFV PoPs. It receives virtual network function packages from the different users including VNF images and virtual network functions descriptors (VNFDs).

Deploys on-demand the VNFs on top of an infrastructure consisting of multiple data center instances (NFV PoPs). Deploys in parallel multiple slices one for each tenant, consisting of one or multiple VNFs. Through this functionality NFVO provides a multi-tenant environment distributed on top of multiple cloud instances.

The NFVO layer is also responsible for Service Orchestration and creates end- to-end service between different VNFs. It achieves this by coordinating with the respective VNFMs so it does not need to talk to VNFs directly. Example would be creating a service between the base station VNF’s of one vendor and core node VNF’s of another vendor.

1. Service Orchestration can instantiate VNFMs, where applicable.
2. It does the topology management of the network services instances (also called VNF Forwarding Graphs).

Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM)

Vivace’s VNFM component manages virtualized VNFs, like Router VNF, Switch VNF, LoadBalancer VNF.

Specifically, VNFM does the following:

• VNFM manages life cycle of VNFs. It creates, maintains and terminates VNF instances that are installed on the Virtual Machines (VMs) by the VIM layer.
• It is responsible for the FCAPs of VNFs (i.e. Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security Management of VNFs).
• It scales up/scales down VNFs, which results in scaling up and scaling down of CPU usage.

The VNFM module utilizes Symphony’s Interlude component for Agentless communication with the deployed Virtual Network Functions. The VNFM is instantiated on demand by the NFVO. It Requests the NFVO for allocation of specific resources for the virtual network instance. It can request the NFVO for instantiation, modification, starting and stopping of the virtual services (or directly to the VIM). Via the Interlude Component it can save and execute specific configuration scripts within the virtual machine instances.