The present document describes a quality accountability framework for NFV. This release focuses on service quality management of network services, VNFs, NFV infrastructure, management and orchestration elements.
The present document describes the following aspects of the Quality Accountability Framework:
Roles, covered in clause 4 Roles in the NFV Ecosystem.
Responsibilities, covered in clauses 5 Responsibilities by Role and 6 Responsibilities for Key Cloud
Characteristics. Service quality measurements and demarcation points, covered in clause 7 Quality Measurement Framework.
The present document develops a report detailing methods for active monitoring of VNFs, NFVI and E2E network services and detection of failures. It addresses the following two aspects of active monitoring:
Periodic testing of VNFs and service chains in a live environment to ensure proper functionality and performance adherence to SLAs.
Failure prevention and detection - Active monitoring methods for failure prevention (proactive) or timely detection and recovery from failures. Failures include loss or degradation of network connectivity, loss or degradation of session capacity, loss of services, VM failures, VM stalls, etc.
The present document proposes that the monitoring agents be on boarded into the NFV environment, just like other VNFs.
The present document describes the models and methods for end-to-end reliability in NFV environments and software upgrade from a resilience perspective. The scope of the present document covers the following items:
Study reliability estimation models for NFV including modelling architecture.
Study NFV reliability and availability methods.
Develop reliability estimation models for these methods, including dynamic operational aspects such as impact of load and life-cycle operations.
Study reliability issues during NFV software upgrade and develop upgrade mechanisms for improving resilience.
Develop guidelines to realise the differentiation of resiliency for different services.
The present document describes a study of how today's Cloud/Data Centre techniques can be adapted to achieve scalability, efficiency, and reliability in NFV environments. These techniques are designed for managing shared processing state with low-latency and high-availability requirements. They are shown to be application-independent that can be applied generally, rather than have each VNF use its own idiosyncratic method for meeting these goals. Although an individual VNF could manage its own scale and replication, the techniques described here require a single coherent manager, such as an orchestrator, to manage the scale and capacity of many disparate VNFs. Today's IT/Cloud Data Centres exhibit very high availability levels by limiting the amount of unique state in a single element and creating a virtual network function from a number of small replicated components whose functional capacity can be scaled in and out by adjusting the running number of components. Reliability and availability for these type of VNFs is provided by a number of small replicated components. When an individual component fails, little state is lost and the overall VNF experiences minimal change in functional capacity. Capacity failures can be recovered by instantiating additional components. The present document considers a variety of use cases, involving differing levels of shared state and different reliability requirements; each case is explored for application-independent ways to manage state, react to failures, and respond to increased load. The intent of the present document is to demonstrate the feasibility of these techniques for achieving high availability for VNFs and provide guidance on Best Practices for scale out system architectures for the management of reliability. As such, the architectures described in the present document are strictly illustrative in nature.
Accordingly, the scope of the present document is stated as follows:
Provide an overview of how such architectures are currently deployed in Cloud/Data Centres.
Describe various categories of state and how scaling state can be managed.
Describe scale-out techniques for instantiating new VNFs in a single location where failures have occurred or unexpected traffic surges have been experienced. Scale-out may be done over multiple servers within a location or in a server in the same rack or cluster within any given location. Scaling out over servers in multiple locations can be investigated in follow-up studies.
Develop guidelines for monitoring state such that suitable requirements for controlling elements (e.g. orchestrator) can be formalized in follow-up studies.
The present document focuses on unique aspects related to network and service resiliency in a virtualised network environment. The challenges result from failures of virtualised network functions, failures of the underlying hardware and software infrastructure arising from conditions such as design faults, intrinsic wear out, operational mistakes, or other adverse conditions, e.g. natural disasters, excessive traffic demand, etc.
The scope of the present document includes:
Usecase analysis for reliability and availability in a virtualised network environment.
Analysis of service availability levels.
Identification of requirements for maintaining network resiliency and service availability, the focus being additional requirements introduced by virtualisation. The mechanisms to be considered include the following:
Network function migration within and across system boundaries.
Failure detection and reporting at the various layers.
Failure prediction, prevention, and remediation.
State management.
Solving network availability issues caused by overload/call blocking conditions.
Engineering and deployment guidelines for maintaining network resiliency and ensuring service availability.
The present document defines a framework for use within ETSI NFV ISG to coordinate and promote public demonstrations of Proofs of Concept (PoC) illustrating key aspects of NFV.
The objective for the PoCs is to build commercial awareness and confidence and encourage development of an open ecosystem by integrating components from different players.
The present document specifies requirements for a set of abstract interfaces enabling a VNF to leverage acceleration services from the infrastructure, regardless of their implementation. The present document also provides an acceleration architectural model to support its deployment model.
The goals of the present document are:
to identify common design patterns that enable an executable VNFC to leverage, at runtime, accelerators to meet their performance objectives;
to describe how a VNF Provider might leverage those accelerators in an implementation independent way; and
to define methods in which all aspects of the VNF (VNFC, VNFD, etc.) could be made independent from accelerator implementations.
VNF providers have to mitigate two goals:
VNFs might have constraints to perform their function within certain power consumption boundaries, CPU core count, PCI express slot usage and with good price/performance ratio; and
VNFs should accommodate most if not all deployment possibilities.
The present document specifies performance benchmarking metrics for virtual switching, with the goal that the metrics will adequately quantify performance gains achieved through virtual switch acceleration conforming to the associated requirements specified herein. The acceleration-related requirements will be applicable to common virtual switching functions across usage models such as packet delivery into VNFs, network overlay and tunnel termination, stateful Network Address Translators (NAT), service chaining, load balancing and, in general, match-action based policies/flows applied to traffic going to/from the VMs. The present document will also provide deployment scenarios with applicability to multiple vendor implementations and recommendations for follow-on proof of concept activities.
The present document specifies functional requirements for both the Virtualised Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), for NFV acceleration from an infrastructure management perspective. This includes the controlling and management of acceleration resources, e.g. allocation, release and discovery of acceleration resources. The present document also identifies the corresponding impacts on VIM related specifications regarding functional requirements ETSI GS NFV-IFA 010 and reference points (ETSI GS NFV-IFA 005 and ETSI GS NFV-IFA 006).
The present document specifies requirements and templates for describing Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) Network Services (NSs) in the form of meta-data.
The present document defines the interfaces supported over the Os-Ma-nfvo reference point of the NFV-MANO architectural framework as well as the information elements exchanged over those interfaces.
Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) Release 2; Management and Orchestration; Os-Ma-Nfvo reference point - Interface and Information Model Specification
