The ETSI 4th NFV Plugtests (the most important NFV interop event) were ran on ETSI’s own NFVI and VIM.
Sophia Antipolis (France), June 7th 2019: A new edition of the NFV Plugtests, the most significant NFV (Network Function Virtualization) testing event has just finished, and this time, the NFV API Conformance Tests were executed on top of a brand new Telco Cloud Infrastructure, powered by Whitestack and operated by ETSI.
ETSI has been executing interoperability tests for years, and a recurrent concern was the high latency that the VNFs were suffering from, due to the global nature of the tests (with clouds deployed in Europe, Asia and the Americas), so after the 3rd Plugtest, ETSI started to look at the option of implementing their own reference NFV infrastructure, with the objective to improve and accelerate the API Conformance testing process for all participants.
“We were looking for something simple to implement, and based on open technologies, in order to preserve the nature of the testing. We lunched a call, and after evaluated the different options, we decided to implement Whitecloud, from Whitestack”, said Silvia Almagia, Technical Expert in the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability.
The implemented solution consists of:
- WhiteServers, Whitestack’s line of high performance servers, on which the NFVI (Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure) was installed.
- WhiteCloud, Whitestack’s Openstack distribution, acting as the VIM (Virtualized Infrastructure Manager) focused on Telco deployments, which has been extensively tested during the previous Plugtests.
During the last NFV Plugtests, a significant number of VNFs were onboarded and Network Services deployed in WhiteCloud. Participants were cheerful: “We tested several VIMs during the NFV Plugtests, and WhiteCloud was not only extremely fast at the moment of instantiating the VNFs, but also proved to be very stable”, said Konstantin Dunaev Consultant System Engineer at A10 Networks.
This new infrastructure is also supporting other activities surrounding the ETSI Open Source MANO project, such as the OSM Hackfests (a series of intensive hands-on training sessions delivered in parallel with the ETSI OSM meetings) and the CD/CI pipeline for the OSM project.
About Whitestack
Whitestack is a telecom infrastructure provider, that builds production-grade solutions, based on commodity hardware, open source software, professional services and carrier-class support, to exceed industry standards.
- Whitestack’s NFVI (Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure) is comprised by WhiteServers (a family of high density servers optimized for the Cloud, powered by the latest Intel® Scalable Processors and NFV hardware acceleration) as the compute nodes, and WhiteSwitches (high capacity whitebox switches, powered by the Broadcom StrataXGS® chipsets) for the switching matrix.
- Whitestack’s VIM (Virtualized Infrastructure Manager) is implemented with WhiteCloud, an OpenStack distribution, with simplified deployment and upgrading, focused on the Telecom market. Whitecloud has been extensively tested at the ETSI NFV PlugTests, with VNF from different vendors.
- Whitestack’s MANO (Management and Orchestration) stack is implemented by WhiteNFV (distribution of the prominent ETSI OSM project), which performs the VNF Management, NFV Orchestration, Performance Monitoring and Policy Management, adhering to the ETSI standards for multi-vendor interoperation.
For more information visit: http://www.whitestack.com, e-mail: contact@whitestack.com
