NFV Practical Implementation

Nfv Practical Orientation

Network functions virtualization (NFV) has changed the way we have traditionally thought about networking design, deployment & Implementation of the networking components within the IT Infrastructure through the approach of virtualization & not through the traditional hardware approach with predefined software within each component.

NFV decouples network functions from underlying hardware resources by virtualizing the storage, network and compute functions (Chiosi, Clarke, Willis, Reid, Feger, Bugenhagen, & Benitez, 2012). The Idea is to save the proprietary equipment cost by virtualizing network functions and creating on servers instead of their defined hardware.

This transition towards virtualization will take a period of time because providers & enterprises are not going to decommission their existing Infrastructure and replace everything by virtualized Individual components as this will be too expensive then.

Figure 1.

Changes with NFV with VNFs

Traditional Network Architecture Limitations

• 1.

  Scalability Limitations.

• 2.

  Vendor dependent predefined hardware & software components.

• 3.

  High operational cost due to the management of Individual hardware within datacenters.

• 4.

  More Space & Power Requirements.

• 5.

  Individual Hardware management Issues.

• 6.

  Huge Capital Expenditure.

• 7.

  Limitation in rapidly offering services to the users due to the time to build the infrastructure.

• 8.

  Additional hardware to deploy for High Availability.

Nfv Benefits

• 1.

  Service Elasticity.

• 2.

  Operational Efficiency.

• 3.

  Automated Network Operations.

• 4.

  Capital Expenditure Reduction.

• 5.

  Vendor agnostic.

• 6.

  Software Oriented Innovation.

• 7.

  Rapid Service Delivery

• 8.

  Reduced Space & Power Consumption.

• 9.

  Hardware Flexibility

• 10.

  Scalability & Multi-tenancy.

• 11.

  Reduction of number of network devices management.

• 12.

  Reduced complexity for HA (High Availability).

• 13.

  Reduction of network elements for deployment and management.

Figure 2.

Network virtualization

Nfv Architecture And Framework

The relevance of NFV framework is to ensure standardization & compatibility between different vendor software pieces of share hardware resources.

Virtualized Network Function (VNF) – A software component that replaces the vendor specific hardware to perform the same function on share hardware, eventually reducing the capital & operational expenses.