In December 2015, the European Advanced Networking Test Centre (EANTC) published results of its NFV interoperability test involving 17 VNFs from 12 vendors. Only one provided a VNF manager with many electing to just use OpenStack Heat templates for open interoperability.
The effort to integrate such bespoke VNFs not only demands that operators provide complex VNF on-boarding processes, but also reintroduces the spectre of vendor-lock-in. This will not help with the adoption of NFV and will impact the competitiveness of operators.
Another significant limitation with managing VNFs is lifecycle management. 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.
Openet has considerable experience solving real world problems encountered by operators as they move toward virtualised and NFV type deployments, we help to remove a major pain point in managing diverse VNFs and assist operators and system integrators to avoid vendor-lock.
Rather than creating new VM instances, Weaver, Openet’s generic VNF manager works in concert with its generic Element manager, to upgrade software and/or configurations within the existing VM, which greatly reduces the operational time and complexity. Deployments that manage VNFs only at the VM level, operate with coarse control and significant blind spots. Weaver in contrast, provides much better fine grain control and visibility over the deployed VNFs resulting in deployment that is not only faster but also more robust and less error prone.
Weaver also provides the NFV orchestrator with 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. Weaver’s APIs abstract away the complexity of managing each of the underlying distributed VNFs. The orchestrator may operate on the VNF as if it was a single entity as opposed to a set of distributed components that simplifies the management of orchestrating VNFs and creating service chains.
Weaver is now available free of charge as a community edition.
Based on the same technology that is used by Openet’s Tier 1 customers to successfully manage multiple VNFs at scale across datacentres. It has already delivered significant improvements in handling deployment of VNFs across hundreds of servers in multiple data centres.
For more information please see our short video called Introduction: What is Weaver™ at https://nfv.openet.com/media/
The Weaver product and documentation may be freely downloaded by visiting https://nfv.openet.com/
Why not come meet us at the NFV Work Congress from April 19 to 22.
Openet will be demonstrating Weaver at Booth 17, Doubletree Hilton, and San Jose, USA
