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OlivierDaures

2nd ETSI NFV Plugtests interoperability event - great progress addressing VNF Onboarding challenges

Last week HPE participated in the 2nd ETSI NFV Plugtests interoperability event that took place at ETSIโ€™s headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France. Such events are critical in validating standard specifications against real cases: we were able to achieve more in one week, as a community, than we achieve in months on customer projects.

ETSI people Plugtests.jpg

If we look at last year, in the 1st ETSI NFV Plugtests event, HPE already successfully integrated HPE NFV Director with the 14 VNFs that were part of Plugtests. This was achieved over 6 different virtual infrastructures, including for advanced operations such as update and automatic scaling, with close-loop performed on the VNFs that supported it. This year, the testing scope had been extended with multi-site, assurance, and external VNFM. There were 2 test sessions per day, each focusing on onboarding a different VNF on a different VIM. In total, the vendors tested 10 MANO solutions, 6 VIMs and 13 VNFs, covering all proposed tests including Deploy, Scale, and Network chaining, multi-site. 

Exciting news, there is a clear takeaway from this 2nd ETSI NFV Plugtests event: with the progress of ETSI specs and maturity of VNFs, MANOs and VIMs, more tests could be run in 1 week than at last yearโ€™s event in 2 weeks! In particular, the integration of complex VNFs have become far easier thanks to SOL003 APIs, which we implemented in HPE NFV Director (NFVD). This is very important news, as VNF onboarding has been one of the key inhibitors for large scale adoption of NFV by CSPs. 

We were also pleased to receive positive and constructive feedback about HPE NFV Director V4.2 solution from all the VNF/VIM vendors. HPE NFV Director provides consistent management of multivendor VNFs to efficiently run on heterogeneous hardware platforms and in virtualization environments. It takes responsibility for automatically managing end-to-end service across VNF, VNF forwarding graphs (VNF-FGs), and network services (NSs). HPE NFVD is designed to meet the ETSI specifications for NFV orchestration. This includes the orchestration and management of VNFs and network services, providing global resource management, and consistently applying global, cross-VNF, and VNF-specific policies.

NFV Director.jpg 

Overall, our HPE team was very satisfied with the Plugtests event. We definitely expect a growing interest in those ETSI events going forward, notably from a few NEPs who have yet to attend. Join us next year! 

For more information: 

HPE NFV Director Datasheet

HPE OSS Solutions

HPE Telecommunications & CSP Solutions

ETSI event:

http://www.etsi.org/news-events/events/1207-2nd-nfv-plutests

About the Author

OlivierDaures

Olivier has been in charge of strategic marketing at HPE for the Communications Technology Group (CTG) since 2016. He has over 30 years of experience in the telecommunications and IT industry. Olivier worked first for a System Integrator (SI) before joining a CSP as a senior manager, in charge of developing a new generation of OSS/BSS solutions. He joined the former Compaq in 2000 as a product manager for the IP network management. Since 2000, Olivier has held senior product management positions within HPE in the IT Service Management (ITSM), Business Service Management (BSM) and telecommunications business units. Olivier holds a Master's Degree in mathematics and computer science, with a major in artificial intelligence.