ETSI said that during its recent two-week NFV “Plugtest” event in Spain, 98% of interoperability tests related to features such as network service on-boarding, instantiation and termination succeeded.
“The results for the setup and termination groups were near perfect, achieving almost 100% success for both," said Pierre Lynch, vice chairman of the NFV testing, implementation and open source working group, in a statement. “The results for the three other groups, while encouraging, showed that there is still work to be done on those areas.”
Lynch added that the other groups’ results were expected since “the scale operations are quite complex and the specifications have not been completed yet.”
During the two-week testing process, 35 commercial and open source implementations were tested for interoperability, including 15 virtual network functions, 9 management and orchestration solutions and 11 NFV platforms.
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Over 160 engineers were involved in the preparation of the Plugtests, 80 of them on-site, coming from a diverse community of NFV implementers, including vendors and key open source projects such as ETSI OSM, Open Baton, OPEN-O and OPNFV.
Each of the test sessions were organized in several parallel tracks to ensure that all participants had at least one test session scheduled any time and that a maximum number of combinations could be tested. Every day during the event, 10 different combinations of MANO and VIM&NFVI (NFV platform) were scheduled, with up to 4 VNFs to be tested on each of them during the day. Overall, 160 different combinations of VNF, MANO and VIM&NFVI were tested for interoperability and over 1,500 individual test results were reported.
Developed by ETSI’s Center for Testing and Interoperability, the test plan focused on validating ETSI NFV Release 2 end-to-end capabilities including management of descriptors and software images, as well as life cycle management of network services and virtual network functions. The test plan included 26 test cases, classified in several groups going from onboarding and instantiation, through different types of scaling and network service updates to terminate and teardown operations.