HPE NFV DIRECTORAgility and automation for telco grade multi-vendor environments

HPE NFV Director—in step with service provider needs• Avoids creating new technical or

organizational silos of management for NFV

• Easily integrates virtualized network functions into your OSS and IT environment

• Smoothens NFV expansion, painlessly adding additional VNF and infrastructure

• Reduces risk by implementing rules‑based automation based on dynamic inventory

• Avoids vendor lock‑in at infrastructure or VNF level by implementing a standard based approach

ADDRESS NFV CHALLENGES

While carriers throughout the world are enthusiastically adopting NFV for its greater flexibility and promise for controlling and reducing OPEX and CAPEX, it does introduce operational challenges:

• Existing operations support system/business support system (OSS/BSS) systems cannot handle dynamicity of NFV environment

• Maintain customer and services view correlated to underlying infrastructure

• Zero‑touch automation to enable NFV agility in large distributed environments

• Ensure reduced operations costs while deploying NFV

HPE NFV Director provides for consistent management and behavior of multi‑vendor virtual network functions (VNFs) to efficiently run on heterogeneous commercial off‑the‑shelf (COTS) hardware platforms and virtualization environments.

HPE NFV Director is designed to meet the evolving European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specifications for the NFV orchestrator functionality. This includes the orchestration and lifecycle management of VNFs, providing the global resource management, and consistently applying global, cross‑VNF, and VNF‑specific policies.

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Standards compliance and multi-vendor support • Conforms to ETSI specifications—SOL 001, SOL 003, and SOL 004

• Supports multi‑vendors VNFs, VNFMs, and VIMs

• Flexible to accommodate non‑compliant VNF vendors

Resource orchestration • Supports multiple flavors of OpenStack VIM from multiple vendors

• Supports VMware vCenter® and VMware vCloud Director® VIMs

• Discovers (periodic and on‑demand) virtual infrastructure from across multiple VIMs and maintains global resource inventory

• Allocates and orchestrates resources based on the VNF needs

• Provides extended platform awareness

Virtual data center support • Provides abstraction of resources from multiple DCs

• Caters to multi‑tenancy and security needs of the service provider departmental silos

VNF onboarding and management • Models VNFs using GUI based VNF Designer

• Imports/exports vendor provided VNF models

• Onboard VNF packages consistently (both vendors provided and developed using NFV Director)

• Consistent mechanism to deploy and perform LCM of VNFs

– Vendor provided S‑VNFMs Or

– Embedded Generic VNFM capability of NFV Director

• Performs Day 0 and Day 1/N configuration

• Supports multiple VNF versions simultaneously, can manage VNFs under staging and production

• Supports EPA features and placement of VNFs with EPA needs

• VNF details (configurations and parameters) can be exported and imported seamlessly between staging and production, allowing for seamless migration to production after staging and soak testing

• Assurance and monitoring continue seamlessly along with VNF movement

• Brownfield VNF discovery and management—Discover and adopt VNFs (deployed by hand or by VNFMs), manage and orchestrate them

• LCM notifications are published on Kafka bus

CNF onboarding and management • Discovers Kubernetes namespaces

• Onboard VNFs that contain either VMs or Helm charts or a combination of both

• Supports LCM operations—Instantiate, Terminate, and Modify instance

Assurance closed-loop with Fulfillment • Resource and VNF KPIs monitoring initiated as soon as VNF is deployed

• Maintains complete VNF topology and performs topology‑based correlation across different levels of VNF topology (VNF‑>VNFC‑>VDU‑>VM‑>Physical compute)

• Provides topology view—Know exactly in which DC, in which Availability zone the VNF is deployed and where it moved in case of a disaster

• Custom monitors can be built to collect KPIs from a specific source peculiar to the VNF

• Provides a complete feedback loop between Assurance and Fulfillment

• Prevents VNF and Service downtime by executing pro‑active automated actions to Heal/Scale the service before customer experiences service impact

Secure, reliable, and resilient solution • Micro services based platform architecture

• Secured interfaces and APIs—supports https with TLS 1.2

• Role Based Access Control (RBAC) for user and access management

• All actions are logged, log consolidation using Kibana

• Supports self‑monitoring and high availability (HA) with in a single site

• Supports Geo‑redundancy architecture across multiple sites separated by large geographical distance

HPE NFV DIRECTOR FEATURE SUMMARY

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HPE NFV DIRECTOR OVERVIEW

HPE NFV Director (NFVD) orchestrates multi‑vendor VNFs on multi‑VIM platforms. NFV Director is 100% ETSI compliant VNF and Resource orchestrator. It provides an embedded VNFM capability to orchestrate VNFs as well integrate with vendor provided S‑VNFMs to perform VNF lifecycle management. NFV Director provides a VNF Designer to model VNFs consistently, allowing for quick onboarding which is the single most impediment currently for NFV implementation.

NFV Director provides closed loop automation between Fulfillment and Assurance by which pre‑defined actions can be automatically executed with minimum or no operator intervention. The pro‑active actions help in resolving the potentially service affecting issues before they become noticeable. NFVD provides operators complete visibility and control over where their VNFs are deployed.

FIGURE 1. HPE NFV Director closed loop orchestration for ETSI MANO

HPE NFV DIRECTOR—KEY FEATURES

Resource orchestration NFVO and VIM managed modesNFV Director provides capability to orchestrate resources both when NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) has complete control over the VIM with Admin rights and when VIM administrator provides only tenant level access to VIM.

Discover data center resourcesNFV Director provides UI driven data center discovery. The administrator can perform periodic and on‑demand discovery, complete DC, or scoped discovery.

The discovery capability is supported for OpenStack, VMware vCenter, and vCloud Director VIMs. The Kubernetes namespaces are discovered as well.

NFV Director maintains complete global resource inventory across multiple VIMs and Kubernetes namespaces that it discovers. NFV Director uses this information for effective NF placement.

Onboarding made simpleImport SOL 004 VNF package and SOL 001 descriptorNFV Director supports the import of ETSI SOL 004 compliant VNF packages and of vendor provided SOL 001 VNF descriptors.

HPE NFV Director comes with: • Model based co‑ordination and control

engine for orchestration

• Agentless monitoring for infrastructure (physical and virtual) and NFV application monitoring

• Dynamic topology‑based correlation to address dynamic and complex topology hosting VNFs

• Rule‑based autonomous actions to trigger policy‑based orchestration workflows

• An embedded VNF Manager capability to provide VNF manager functionality for VNF vendors

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Design and creating the VNF descriptorThe built‑in VNF Designer allows to design and build the VNF descriptor. This is useful when the vendor provided descriptor comes in a non‑ETSI format.

The Communication Service Provider can consistently define VNF descriptors and onboard the VNF. The VNFs can be deployed and managed using the NFV Director Generic VNFM capability.

Enriching the descriptorOnce the descriptor is imported, the operator can augment the VNF definition with the rich modelling capability provided by VNF Designer. The operator can add extra specifications to VNF VMs, assign monitors, pass metadata to VNFs, assign security groups, attach Ephemeral disks etc.

FIGURE 2. NFV Designer GUI based enrichment of VNF descriptors adding policies, monitors, etc.

CNF orchestrationHPE NFV Director conforms to ETSI IFA 029. NFV Director supports containerized VNFs on VMs and Bare Metal using Helm charts. NFV Director supports instantiate, terminate, and modify instance LCM operations. LCM notifications are published to Kafka bus for third‑party systems to consume. There is no difference in the operational processes for onboarding or performing LCM operations between VNFs and CNFs. Kubernetes is treated just like another VIM from orchestration perspective.

Traditional VNFs on VMs Containerized VNFs on VMs

Hardware resources

Containerized VNFs on Bare Metal

VNFC VNFC

Hypervisor

VNF

VM VM

Hypervisor

VM VM

VNFC VNFC

VNF

VNFC VNFC

VNF

Virtualization layer

VNFC VNFC

VNF

VNFC VNFC VNFC VNFC VNFC VNFC

VNF

S-VNFM

NFVD

VIM

G-VNFM

Container Container Container Container Container Container Container Container

POD POD POD POD

Compute resources Storage resources Network resources

FIGURE 3. HPE NFV Director with multiple NFVI options and CNF orchestration on Kubernetes

Discover and adopt VNFSBrownfield discovery and VNF adoptionNFV Director discovers the Virtual Machines in OpenStack that were not created by NFV Director as part of VNF deployments. These VMs could potentially have been in OpenStack due to VNFs that were deployed either by hand, heat orchestration, or by a VNFM directly.

HPE NFV Director enables communications service providers to:• Safely transition network from physical

to virtualized mode

• Fully realize the benefit of the NFV promise by properly operationalizing the deployment

• Easily integrate virtualized network functions into OSS and IT environment

• Grow from simple virtualization use cases to complex use cases

• Avoid creating new technical or organizational silos of management for Network Functions Virtualization

• Fully benefit from a standards‑based and multivendor approach

• Enable easier and quicker deployment of network functions for faster innovation and increased revenue

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NFV Director allows the operator to map them to a VNF template within NFV Director and add that VNF into NFV Director catalog for further VNF orchestration and management going forward.

On adoption, all the actions and tasks are triggered as if like a normal VNF deploy. This feature does not affect the VNF status/state in any way. NFV Director can be used to perform all lifecycle operations on the VNF.

Assurance in-step with FulfillmentAssurance dashboard—a single pane of glassNFV Director provides information on the health of NFVD platform (self‑health), status of connectivity to VIM, VNFM, and health of VNFs (alarms and KPIs) in a single pane of glass.

Know where your VNF is deployedNFV Director maintains and displays the VNF topology information (VNF‑>VNFCs‑> VMs‑>Compute nodes). It is possible to drill up and down the topology view.

Monitor VNF KPI status and AlarmsNFV Director collects both VNF resource KPIs and Application KPIs. The KPIs and Alarms are stored, maintained, and made available to northbound systems.

Monitor VIM health (OpenStack services)It is crucial that the Orchestrator is aware of the health of VIM and monitor it to ensure that the VNFs deployed there are available and effectively participate in delivering Network Services. NFV Director periodically monitors the VIM health and reports the same for the operator.

SOFTWARE PRE-REQUISITESSoftware Version

Operating system Linux® RHEL 7.x

Database EnterpriseDB PPAS 10.15, EnterpriseDB connectors v10.0.0‑1 Or Oracle 11gR2/12c

Java Java Development Kit (JDK) version 8.0

Kafka 1.1

Zabbix 4.0

NFV Director also uses following Open Source components which are not shipped as part of the product and need to be directly downloaded (details available in the Installation guide)

Software Version

Software 2.38.1‑1

Apache CouchDB V2.30.1

Graphviz 1.0.2k‑16

OPTIONAL SOFTWARE

The following software is not mandatory but recommended for operational readiness of NFV Director.

Software Version

Elasticsearch 7.0.1

Kibana 7.0.1

Logstash 7.0.1

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COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA SOLUTIONS, HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

Communications and Media Solutions is the business unit at HPE that provides vertical solutions to the communications and media industry. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, we have over 50 solutions and over 1500 active contracts, with more than 300 telco customers in 160 countries. We provide software and services capabilities to enable your digital transformation, automate your operations, and help you grow your business with innovative cloud‑native network solutions and digital, 5G‑ready services.

ABOUT HEWLETT PACKARD ENTERPRISE

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a global technology leader focused on developing intelligent solutions that allow customers to capture, analyze, and act upon data seamlessly from edge to cloud. HPE enables customers to accelerate business outcomes by driving new business models, creating new customer and employee experiences, and increasing operational efficiency today and into the future.

LEARN MORE AThpe.com/dsp/transform

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© Copyright 2017, 2020 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for Hewlett Packard Enterprise products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Hewlett Packard Enterprise shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. VMware vCenter and VMware vCloud Director are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions. All third‑party marks are property of their respective owners.

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