ETSI NFV Plugtest participants achieve nearly 95% interoperability, increase feature support

Standards organization ETSI said it saw high rates of test execution and interoperability for multivendor network services during its second global NFV Plugtest event.

The organization reported that interoperability was achieved in almost 95% of the tests executed, adding that there was a significant increase in feature support across implementations compared to the first Plugtests (65 % execution rate).

Over 200 engineers and 48 organizations were involved in the preparation and running of the event, which was organized by the ETSI Center for Testing and Interoperability and hosted by ETSI in Sophia Antipolis, France, from Jan. 15-19.

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During the event, participants ran multivendor interoperability test sessions among different Functions Under Test (FUTs) from different participants, mainly Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), Management and Orchestration (MANO) solutions and NFV platforms.

This Plugtest was aimed at verifying interoperability among different implementations of the main components of the NFV Architectural Framework, including:

Virtual Network Functions: Testing also focused on providing additional Element Manager (EM) and specific VNF Manager (VNFM) functionalities.

Management and Orchestration solutions: Participants focused on providing integrated NFVO and VNFM functionalities.

NFV Platforms: This included a mix of hardware, providing integrated NFV infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) functionalities.

In all, ETSI said 189 interoperability test sessions were run, each of them on a different system under test featuring a different combination of the 41 participating FUTs. These functions included 19 VNFs, 10 MANO solutions and 12 NFV platforms.

To address aspects such as multivendor network services, fault and performance management, enhanced platform awareness, and multisite deployments, the scope and complexity of the test sessions was increased during the week. The test plan, which included 50% more test cases than last year, will be fed back to the ETSI NFV Industry Specification Group (ISG) together with the overall results and lessons learned by the participants.

A key element of the Plugtest was to incorporate the work of other open source communities working in the NFV space, including ETSI OSM, Open Baton, Open Stack and OPNFV. These groups were involved in the Plugtests and participated in the test sessions through their membership with several implementations.

The co-located first OSM Hackfest offered an additional opportunity to encourage synergy and alignment across the NFV ecosystem. ETSI will hold the second OSM Hackfest in Madrid in March and the second NFV Plugtests event will be held at the end of May in Sophia Antipolis.