More than ten companies will feature in a series of live NFV interoperability demonstrations on the show floor at this year's Big Communications Event (BCE) on May 24 and 25 in Austin, Texas.

The demos, comprising six multivendor demonstrations that include NFV infrastructure (NFVi) elements, virtual network functions (VNFs), orchestration systems and test and measurement technology, were devised in "record time -- we did the initial setup in just one week," says Carsten Rossenhövel, managing director at the European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) , which was commissioned by The New IP Agency to set up and conduct the independent tests.

Rossenhövel says the tests came together "in quite an ad hoc way over the course of a week of hot staging... I'd say this is probably the first real example of an interop. It did not involve months of planning -- the vendors turned up with their technology and we set up and tested multiple scenarios. Each of the six tests has a minimum of four participating vendors and, importantly, the orchestration tools are not always provided by the vendors supplying the NFVi."

Of course it didn't all just work straight out of the box. "We had some challenges for sure," says Rossenhövel, particularly in getting OpenStack to run in the test environment, "but we got there in the end and managed to run a number of successful multivendor test scenarios."

Those tests will be shown at BCE in the form of show floor demonstrations. A full report providing details of the tests will be available to BCE attendees.

For more details of the NFV demo, including the companies that are participating, see this BCE show site page.

— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading