VNF And Infrastructure Testing

With network function virtualization (NFV), traditional monolithic single vendor network functions are replaced by a set of virtualized network functions deployed on a virtualized infrastructure. This new architecture enforces the need to migrate to newer testing methodologies, testing the complete NFV-based solution at different levels:

• Network function virtualized infrastructure (NFVI) block that replaces the traditional dedicated h/w.
• Virtual network function block (VNF) that replaces the h/w dependent monolithic s/w images.
• Management and orchestration (MANO) block that comprises of Virtual Infrastructure manager (VIM), the VNF manager and NFV Orchestrator (NFVO)

While the majority of the MANO block testing can be accomplished via the usual NS/VNF life cycle management operations, testing of the NFVI block and the VNF block requires dedicated strategies.

VNF testing requires a test environment involving the infrastructure for the VNF deployment, test PNF/VNF for interoperability/traffic testing of the VNF under test and a test controller to trigger test execution or monitor results.

Testing NFVI block requires identification of vendor-agnostic performance metrics for benchmarking the infrastructure and the associated measurement techniques. This allows a fair comparison between different NFVI. It also allows benchmarking of a given NFVI for capacity planning and network engineering by emulating the production environment in the infrastructure. Throughput, latency, and packet loss are some common benchmarks used for NFVI testing.