The Challenge for the VNFM – How to Deliver on the NFV Promise

The webinar explores how the selection of a VNF manager impacts two significant challenges in deploying NFV: 1. How the use of a generic VNF manager helps ensure deployments remain open and vendor independent. 2. How managing VNF lifecycle management impacts the ability to ensure Carrier-Grade Operations. The success of any NFV 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 is operationally complex and particularly so when managing multi-vendor deployments. To date, VNF managers typically manage VNFs only at the virtual machine level, needing to fully stop and restart the complete virtual machine to carry out any update or upgrade procedures. Deployments that manage VNFs only at the VM level provide only infrastructure management, and they not only operate with coarse control and significant blind spots, they also make it difficult to ensure in-service upgrades, i.e., the ability to carry out updating or upgrading without impacting production traffic. This webinar will discuss how to support efficient in-service VNF management. The VNF manager should provide VNF orchestration and management on two levels: software and infrastructure. Upgrading software and/or configurations within the existing VM instead of simply creating new VM instances greatly reduces the operational time and complexity by providing much better fine grain control and visibility over the deployed VNFs, resulting in maintenance procedures that are not only faster but also more robust and less error prone.