In my current role, I am involved in a lot of discussions around network functions virtualization, a.k.a. NFV. Talking about NFV in this post, I mean telco applications. By that I mean applications specifically designed for and used by Communications Service Providers (CSPs) as core applications to, for instance, enable your (mobile) phone to actually be able to call another phone. 🙂
NFV with regards to telco applications is not that mainstream so it seems. The old school native way, having telco specific hardware running line cards, payload servers, etc., obviously is not sustainable looking at the current way we like to do ICT. On the other hand, it looks like telco application vendors are still finding their way on how to properly adopt virtualization as a technology. So it looks like the level of virtualization adoption for network functions is a few years back in comparison to IT application server virtualization.
But development is rapid, and so it is for NFV. There already is a NFV Architecture Framework created by ETSI. ETSI was selected in November 2012 to be the home of the Industry Specification Group for NFV. The framework is a high-level functional architecture and design philosophy for virtualized network functions and the underlying virtualization infrastructure as shown in the following diagram:
Although there are words that NFV is mostly deployed using a KVM hypervisor working closely with OpenStack as the API framework for NFV, VMware is looking to hook into the needs of the communications service providers to properly ‘do’ NFV using VMware solutions. Hence the vCloud for NFV suite.
VMware vCloud NFV is a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) services delivery, operations and management platform, developed for Communications Service Providers (CSPs) who want to reduce infrastructure CapEx and OpEx costs, improve operational agility and monetize new services with rapid time to market.
Let’s have a closer look at tuning considerations for vSphere to properly run NFV workloads!
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