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In this specification, the terms must, must not, should, should not, and may, have have specific meanings defined here.
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<< point to the document "Guidelines for Virtual Network Functions in a Network Cloud" when it is "open" >>
The above document references certain ETSI standards that apply to the development of VNFs, such as ETSI VNF Packaging Specification, GS NFV IFA011, which provides requirements for the structure and format of a VNF package.
On the other hand, a A key distinction between VNFs created for OpenECOMP versus VNFs created for ETSI's MANO model is this: under OpenECOMP, VNF providers do not provide their own proprietary VNF Managers (VNFM) or Element Management Systems (EMS). Those Instead, those capabilities are provided by OpenECOMP. Hence, VNFs are required to consume standard interfaces to OpenECOMP in support of management and control. The VNF Package must include the appropriate data models for integration with OpenECOMP to enable control of the VNFs. The resulting standardization of VNFs will allow them to interoperate and to be managed consistently.
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Targeted Virtualization Environment
VNFs, as carrier-grade services, must deliver higher availability (five nines -- 99.999%, or higher) than network cloud components (typically three nines). To do this, they must be designed using distributed design techniques to tolerate failures.
Infrastructure Agnostic and Virtualized
VNFs must have no dependencies on hardware, host OS, or hypervisor. Assume that the network cloud will rapidly evolve. Moving a service across hosts, datacenters, or network clouds should not be a problem assuming capability parity.
VNFs requiring high packet processing requirements will need to take advantage of Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) optimizations. For VNFs with exceptionally high packet per second needs, Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) can be supported. SR-IOV support will be limited to specific use cases with mature Cloud Native capabilities including VNF based resiliency.
Resiliency
ECOMP Ready
CI/CD
Figure 1 VNF Complete Lifecycle Stages
Creating a VNF
The VNF API
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