The potential to onboard virtual network functions (VNFs), the basic components of network virtualization, is being supported by an increasing number of networking specialists, as shown by a spate of recent announcements.
Huawei rolled out its Cloud Native VNF solution, while VMware released VMware vCloud NFV 2.0, the newest generation of its NFV platform that combines NFVi, virtual infrastructure managers, VNFs and NFV orchestration. (See Huawei's NFV Solution Awarded Best Technology Enabler at MWC 2017 and VMware Makes Major MWC Splash.)
Likewise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) are collaborating so that Red Hat can use HPE's OpenNFV Labs for VNF validation, and Red hat OpenStack Platform customers can access HPE's VNF Onboarding services. (See HPE, Red Hat Team on Storage, OpenStack for NFV.)
As these NFV trends continue, the need for testing and monitoring NFVi platforms and VNFs will be paramount. There are a number of such solutions listed in Testapedia, including:
Spirent's TestCenter Virtual, which validates NFV infrastructure, VNFs and network services by creating elastic test topologies to run on both the control plane and data plane to stress simulated, virtualized network functions.
SDCloud Dev/Test from Criterion Networks, which runs an OpenStack-based virtual environment with a choice of SDN controllers and VNFs in the public cloud to automatically provision and deploy fully isolated multi-node SDN/NFV solution environments. From there, the Dev/Test platform can be used to deploy multi-vendor SDN/NFV sandboxes with a number of options.
TrueSpeed VNF from Viavi, which provides throughput testing as a virtual network function based on RFC 6349 TCP Throughput Testing.
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