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CGNAT & IPv6 Migration
October 1, 2019
In this video, Corporate Systems Engineer, Bharath Kumar, explains what network function virtualization is and why it is useful.
Today I’m going to be talking about Network Function Virtualization, NFV.
Basically, breaks down to virtualizing network functions. Network functions such as routers, firewalls, load balancers, and so on. But why virtualize and why NFV?
The traditional way of building is using vendor specific, purpose-built servers which are expensive, tedious to build, slow deployment process, to perform upgrades, and scale and scale out and etc. NFV resolves the issue by decoupling the software from the hardware.
NFV basically simply requires an x86 hardware with storage and switching to virtualize all the networking functions to form a cloud data center.
NFV has been a concept until ETSI, European telecommunications Standards Institute, has standardized the NFV architecture. NFV architecture on a very high level has four major components.
NFVi, VNF, Mano, OSS and BSS component.
Let’s talk about each of these components in a little more detail. NFVi, the building block for the NFV environment.
NFVi is basically a resource pool of hardware and virtual resources for the NFV environment.
]For the device itself and three major components: hardware resources, virtualization layer and virtualized resources.
Hardware resources are the hardware compute, Hardware network, and hardware store is resources like RAM, servers, and NAS.
So, hardware resources, basically provide the hardware compute power. Virtualization layer let’s the software progress independently from the hardware. Tools such as KVM, Cameo, VMware, and OpenStack can be used as a virtualization layer.
Virtualized resources are the virtual compute, virtual network, and virtual storage resources.
NFVi basically provides a building block for the overall NFV environment. Now, moving on to our next topic, VNF.
VNFs are the building blocks for the NFV environment. Basically, VNFs are the outcome of the NFV implementation. Multiple virtualized network functions map together in the process called service chaining, provide a seamless, fully functional network communication services.
Moving on to our third topic, Mano layer. Mano means management and network orchestrator further … divides itself into three layers, … three parts.
When virtualized infrastructure manager, VNF manager, orchestrator. Virtual infrastructure manager basically manages the interactions of the VNF, virtual Network functions with the NFVi resources. VNF manager manages the life cycle of a VNF instance.
Starting from initiate, update, query, scale, and terminate. Orchestrator is responsible for policy management, KPI monitoring, and orchestration of the VNFs.
The last and the final component of the NFV architecture is the OSS/BSS layer.
OSS/BSS layer is the operations support system and the business support system. Operation support system, such as network management, fault management, Etc.
Business support system deals with customer management, billing management, and revenue management. To summarize, NFV provides a low-cost, accelerated deployment for the network administrators for a seamless fully functional networking communication services.
Thank you for watching. I hope you learned something.
