VMware announced the second major release of its ETSI-compliant, modular, multi-tenancy NFV platform for delivering openness and choice across the NFV technology stack—NFV infrastructure (NFVI), Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM), Virtual Network Functions (VNF) and NFV Orchestration (NFVO) .
VMware said its vCloud NFV 2.0 combines a highly available, carrier-grade network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) with Day 2 operations management and service assurance capabilities to drive successful NFV deployments and operations.
“In today’s highly competitive environment, CSPs must deliver innovative services faster, with the best end-to-end customer experience and at the lowest cost. Current network architectures, including some virtualized deployments, remain rigid and expensive to build and manage,” said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. “With more than 80 NFV deployments by more than 45 CSPs serving 300 million subscribers worldwide, VMware vCloud NFV enables the transformation of network architectures, services delivery, operations and economics through a more dynamic, agile network built on software.”
Highlights:
- Service Automation: vCloud NFV accelerates service creation, onboarding and deployment, and enables policy-based resource and workload allocation across the NFVI. The newest release includes the ability to embed advanced service-centric policies and resource requirements during VNF packaging and automated importing of existing VNF workloads into VMware Integrated OpenStack.
- Secure Multi-Tenancy: vCloud NFV helps CSPs achieve complete service isolation in a secure multi-tenant environment across NFVI functions. Now with native integration between vCloud Director and VMware NSX network virtualization, service providers will be able to use micro-segmentation to deploy a programmable network with fine-grained security and role-based, delegated access control for both providers and tenants. As a result, multi-VNFs with multi-services will be able to seamlessly share the same infrastructure, yet have complete isolation from each other.
- Operations Management: VMware vCloud NFV delivers NFVI operational automation with 360-degree visibility along with proactive and predictive analytics to deliver performance feedback and fast remediation capabilities. With the newest release, CSPs will be able to get full visibility of all components within a deployed service across overlay, underlay, virtual and physical environments through vRealize Network Insight. The vCloud NFV platform provides continuous, near real-time data on the health, performance, capacity of network resources, along with prioritized alert notifications for closed-loop integration into resource and service orchestration workflows. Open APIs provide northbound integration with leading service assurance solutions.
- Carrier-Grade Availability: VMware vCloud NFV is a highly available platform providing service continuity in production networks at scale. With simplified infrastructure lifecycle management, service providers will be able to seamlessly upgrade and apply patches with minimal impact to operations and network stability. Advanced high availability (HA) features will enable intelligent and proactive HA based on VNF requirements and platform capabilities. Predictive and network-aware distributed resource scheduler (DRS) will enable proactive and predictive VNF resource monitoring and closed-loop remediation. Performance enhancements will include accelerated packet performance, and improved security hardening will be delivered through VM level encryption and secure boot.
In addition, VMware, Intel and Cloudify hosted an open VNF on-boarding hackathon at Mobile World Congress to raise industry awareness and initiate an industry review of a proposed TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) based VNF Data Models agreement.