®

White Paper

Managing NFV:
Why Virtualized Network
Function Management is Key
How to manage the complexity of multi-vendor,
carrier grade production solutions across
distributed systems at scale

© Copyright Openet Telecom, 2016

White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

INDEX
Background 2
Delivering on the Promises of NFV 3
The End of Vendor Lock-in 3
Service Agility 3
Carrier-Grade Operations 3
The Role of the VNFM manager 4
The Challenge for the VNFM – How to Deliver on the NFV Promise 5
Other Esential Features for a Generic VNFM Include 6
Openet Weaver™ - An Open and Agnostic Generic VNF Manager 7
About Openet 8

BACKGROUND
The original Network Function Virtualization whitepaper was authored by thirteen of the
world’s largest Tier 1 service providers and published on October 2012 at the “SDN and
OpenFlow World Congress” in Darmstadt-Germany. It described the operator’s goal to
move from dedicated proprietary and closed systems, to systems based on standard
IT virtualization technology and Open Standards.1 The vision recognized that as the
innovation cycles continue to accelerate, hardware-based appliances rapidly reach end
of life. Simply having a hard-wired network with boxes dedicated to single functions is
not the optimal way to achieve dynamic service offerings. The ultimate goal was the
enablement of the software defined or programmable network so that networks become
more agile and better able to respond automatically and on-demand to the dynamic
needs of the traffic and services running over it.
In January 2013 the Industry Specification Group for Network Functions Virtualization
(ETSI ISG NFV) was launched under the auspices of the independent standardization
group, The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI). The NFV ISG
is charged with coordinating the development of requirements and architecture for
virtualization within telecoms networks. The ultimate goal is the enablement of the
software defined or programmable network so that networks become more agile and
better able to respond automatically to changing needs.
The membership of ISG NFV has now grown to over 290 individual companies including
38 of the world’s major service providers as well as representatives from both telecoms
and IT vendors.2
So, significant progress has been made, NFV now represents the position of the
majority of the world’s network operators for the direction of network technology and
deployments are now beginning in earnest. For example, AT&T exceeded its goal of
virtualizing 5% of its network in 2015 and aims to have 30% done by end of 2016 and
75 % by 2020.3

1 http://portal.etsi.org/NFV/NFV_White_Paper.pdf
2 http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/nfv
3 http://about.att.com/story/unveils_5g_roadmap_including_trials.html

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White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

DELIVERING ON THE PROMISES OF NFV

The End of Vendor Lock-in

As discovered by sdxcentral’s 2016 Mega NFV Report, the primary NFV goal for operators
is to create new revenue-generating services on an open, interoperable NFV platform.4
This need echoes a founding principle of NFV described in the original whitepaper
for the avoidance of vendor lock-in; “Network operators need to be able to “mix &
match” hardware from different vendors, hypervisors from different vendors and virtual
appliances from different vendors without incurring significant integration costs and
avoiding lock-in”.1

Service Agility
An important aspect of new revenue-generating services is the concept of service agility.
The service agility provided by NFV offers a quicker time to revenue: as service providers
can quickly add, drop, and change the services and applications. As Bryan Sullivan,
director of service standards for AT&T stated at an NFV World Congress workshop; “The
No. 1 opportunity is really agility, to turn up some circuit across the country, it should be
minutes instead of months.” 5

Carrier-Grade Operations
NFV has the potential to revolutionize how network services are deployed, but,
the telecom network must still be engineered for five-nine. The embracing of cloud
deployment technologies such as NFV must not undermine the traditional carrier grade
reliability and QoE. Solution developers need to understand that “carrier-grade” is not just
an affectation but is fundamental.
 

4 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:68fpY8vml7EJ:https://www.sdxcentral.com/
reports/nfv-vnf-2016/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie

5 https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/5-benefits-carriers-want-out-of-nfv/2015/05/

© Copyright Openet Telecom, 2016 ®

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White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

THE ROLE OF THE VNF MANAGER

The diagram in Figure 1, shows the basic NFV architecture as defined by the ETSI NFV
ISG. The fundamental building block is the Virtualized Network Function (VNF) – The
software implementation of a physical network function. The VNF is the essence of
how dedicated proprietary hardware systems are migrated to standard IT virtualization
technology enabling, for example, virtual gateways and such to create virtual Evolved
Packet Core (vEPC). By deploying as software applications means virtualized functions
are more easily installed and provisioned. The ability to easily tear down, move, scale
and configure services as the demands of customers or the business changes and
accelerated time-to-market for new services is very much a game changer for operators.

Figure 1 NFV architecture

The key to enabling this is the VNF manager. Although the VNFs are core to NFV
capability as they deliver the actual network functions that create value, they are not
autonomous. The Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM) is responsible for the
lifecycle management of VNFs and carries out the necessary functions to deploy a VNF
including instantiation, scaling, updating/upgrading and termination.
 

© Copyright Openet Telecom, 2016 ®

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White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

THE CHALLENGE FOR THE VNFM –

HOW TO DELIVER ON THE NFV PROMISE
As stated previously, in order to become more agile, telecoms operators need NFV to
be fully open. NFV deployments must manage carrier grade production systems at scale
whilst supporting multi-vendor VNFs with a rapid evolution of features and functions.
The need to manage VNFs with vendor specific VNF Managers may often be the default
position to accommodate particular VNF performance or complexity issues. However,
operators must guard against this as the effort to integrate such bespoke VNFs not only
demands that operators provide complex VNF on-boarding processes, but also means
the higher orchestration layers must cope with silos of vendor specific EMS and VNF
managers. This reintroduces the spectre of vendor-lock-in, potentially slows the adoption
of NFV and impacts the competitiveness of operators.
Another significant challenge is how managing the VNF lifecycle impacts the ability to
ensure Carrier-Grade Operations. The true success of any solution is how the system
is managed in production after virtual function components are initially instantiated and
operating. The need to manage carrier grade production solutions across distributed
systems at scale, likely accompanied by a rapid evaluation of features and functions in
VNF services is operationally complex and particularly so when managing multi-vendor
deployments. To date, VNF managers typically manage VNFs only at the virtual machine
level, needing to fully stop and restart the complete virtual machine to carry out any
update or upgrade procedures. Deployments that manage VNFs only at the VM level
provide only infrastructure management and not only operate with coarse control and
significant blind spots, they also make it difficult to ensure in-service upgrades, i.e. the
ability to carry out updating or upgrading without impacting production traffic.
It is recommended that to support efficient in-service VNF management, the VNF
manager should provide VNF management on two levels; software and infrastructure.
This enables upgrading software and/or configurations within the existing VM, instead
of simply creating new VM instances. This will greatly reduce the operational time and
complexity by providing much better fine grain control and visibility over the deployed
VNFs, resulting in maintenance procedures that are not only faster but also more robust
and less error prone.

Figure 2

© Copyright Openet Telecom, 2016 ®

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White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

Other Essential Features For a Generic VNFM Include:

yy Must be ETSI (European Telecoms Standard Institute) compliant generic VNF-
Manager
yy Provide configuration management, monitoring, recovery, VNF orchestration and
lifecycle management of diverse multi domain and multi-vendor VNFs
yy Highly flexible and converged generic VNFM and EMS layer simplify the variation of
lifecycle management requirements for diverse VNFs
yy Multi tier architecture uses metadata descriptors to manipulate the specific VNFM
lifecycle operations and EMS functions
yy Flow Driven VNF Lifecycle Management using a workflow or logically linked
sequence of steps
 

OPENET WEAVER - AN OPEN & AGNOSTIC GENERIC VNF

MANAGER

Weaver™ is based on the same technology that is used by Openet’s Tier 1 customers to
successfully manage multiple VNFs at scale across datacentres. As such it has already
delivered significant improvements in handling deployment of VNFs across hundreds
of servers in multiple data centres. This has resulted in reducing deployment and
maintenance timeframes from weeks to minutes.
Using a metadata-driven architecture to deliver a highly flexible and converged generic
VNFM and EMS layer to manage the variation of lifecycle management requirements for
diverse VNFs. It simplifies integration by providing the operator’s global orchestrator a
single unified interface to manage the lifecycle of all the VNFs on their network instead of
having to integrate with separate VNFM and EMS silos.
Its agnostic approach provides consistent management capability to a complex NVF
ecosystem. It can integrate with vendor specific VNFMs or provide VNFM functionality to
VNFs where a native VNFM does not exist or lacks capability. It can also deliver VNFM
capability to custom “ad hoc” virtual solutions.
Features include:
ETSI (European Telecoms Standard Institute) compliant generic VNF-Manager
Avoids a VM-centric approach to VNF lifecycle management
yy Manages VNF software components
yy Manages VNF infrastructure components
yy Enables fine grain control and visibility during VNF lifecycle operations
Supports templates and workflows to automate the management of VNF lifecycles at
both the infrastructure and application layers
Provides an easy to use point and click workflow studio
yy configure the steps needed to perform end-to-end lifecycle operations for VNF
such as instantiation, update, upgrade, rollback, and termination
Available as free to use community edition http://nfv.openet.com/
See more at: http://nfv.openet.com/

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White Paper: Managing NFV: Why Virtualized Network Function Management is Key

ABOUT OPENET
Openet provides the systems and expertise to assist Communication Service Providers
to grow to become Digital Service Providers. Openet enables this through our real-time
monetization, control, and big data preparation systems. Our solutions enable service
providers to be more innovative in how they engage with their customers to drive new
revenues and increase their share of their customers’ digital spend.
Since its foundation in 1999, Openet has constantly been at the forefront of telecoms
software development and innovation. Its success is personified by the many long-term
relationships it has fostered with the largest, most progressive, and demanding operators
across the globe.
In the NFV arena Openet is a member of the ETSI Network Functions Virtualization
Industry Specification Group and has been at the vanguard of network virtualization. It
has successfully deployed virtualized solutions with many world-leading Tier 1 operators.
Openet’s systems have always been open in support of standards, open interfaces and
being truly vendor agnostic. For more information, please visit www.openet.com.

OUR BELIEFS
We believe that it is not the strongest of the s pecies that survives, nor the most intelligent,
it is the one that is most adaptable to change. This is true for our customers and for our
own business.
We believe in our expertise and our people and that collaboration raises our performance
above others. We believe in “open” networks and systems as these enable our customers
to innovate, adapt and transform.
We deliver software solutions and services that reflect these beliefs.

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