Cisco

OVS Data Plane Development kit is an enhanced Open vSwitch with Data Plane Development Kit libraries. The DPDK was included to try overcome the performance limitations due to CPU interrupts from the physical NIC. OVS with DPDK operates entirely in user space. The DPDK Poll Mode Driver (PMD) in OVS polls for data that comes…

Data traffic is received by the physical NIC and placed into an Rx queue (ring buffer) within the physical NIC The physical NIC sends the packet and a descriptor to the main memory buffer through direct memory access. The packet descriptor contains only the memory location and size of the packet The physical NIC sends…

In a non-virtualised environment, traffic that is sent to a device is received by a physical NIC then sent through the kernel space to the application in the user space. In a virtual environment, there are physical NICs and virtual NICs with a hypervisor with a virtual switch between them. The hypervisor and virtual switch…

Input/Output Communication between a computing system and the outside world. Input is data received by the computing system, output is the data sent from it I/O Device A peripheral device such a mouse, keyboard, monitor or network interface card Interrupt Request (IRQ) A hardware signal sent to the CPU by an I/O device to notify…

In NFV solutions, the data traffic has two patterns, north south and east west. North to south traffic comes from the hosting server into a physical NIC and is sent to a VNF. The traffic is then sent to the VNF back out of the physical wire through to the physical NIC. East west traffic…

Operations Support System is a platform operated by service providers and large enterprise networks to support all their networks system and services. The operations support system can assist in maintaining network inventory; provisioning new services, configuring new network devices and resolving network issues. For service providers, operations support system operates in tandem with business support…

The NFV orchestrator is responsible for creating, maintaining and tearing down VNF network services. If multiple VNFs are part of a network service, the NFV orchestrator enables the creation of an end-to-end network service over multiple VNFs. The VNF manager manages the lifecycle of one or multiple VNFs as well as FCAPS for the virtual…

Element Managers, known as element management systems are responsible for the functional management of VNFs. They perform fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security functions for VNFs. A single element manager can manage one or multiple VNFs, and an EM can also be a VNF itself.

The NFVI Virtualised Infrastructure Manager is responsible for managing and controlling the NFVI hardware resources (compute, storage, and network) and virtualised resources. It collects performance measurements and fault information and performs life cycle management (setup, maintenance, tear down) of all NFVI resources as well as VNF chaining.

A virtual network f unction is a virtual or software version of a network function. It runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor. Virtual network functions are commonly used for Layer 4 to Layer 7 functions, such as those provided by Load Balancers and Application Delivery Controllers, firewalls, intrusion detection systems and WAN optimisation…