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Ahmed Didouh 1
Course Objectives
• Chapter 1: Introduction to Network Virtualization and SDN
• Chapter 2: Network Hypervisors and Flow Management
• Chapter 3: Network Virtualization Platforms
• ONOS Plateform
• OpenDayLight
• Chapter 4: Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
• Chapter 5: Overview of OpenStack for NFV Deployment
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OpenDayLight Architecture
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ODL versions evolution
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ODL controller
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ODL GUI
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Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)
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Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)
Relocating network functions from dedicated appliances to pools of generic
industry servers, leveraging:
• A Cloud Computing Technology
• A Virtualisation Technologies
• Advances in general purpose processors performance
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Expected Benefits: Cost
Reduction and Increased Agility
• A Lower CAPEX-Capital Expenditure-
(commodity servers) and OPEX (high
automation)
• Greater flexibility to scale up and down
resources assigned to applications
based on actual usage
• Reduced time-to-market to deploy new
or upgraded network services
• Ability to handle several tenants on the
same infrastructure
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SDN & NFV
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SDN and NFV are orthogonal to
each other
• SDN decouples (and centralizes) the control plane from the user/data/forwarding plane.
• NFV decouples the software from the hardware.
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NFV & SDN hand-in-hand
• Combining SDN and NFV to enable automation
of connectivity services management
• Implementing SDN using the NFV technology
• Implementing NFV using the SDN technology
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NFV natively supports Network Slicing
• “Network Functions
Virtualisation in
mobile networks can also be
used to create core
network instances optimized
for specific services, e.g.
for Machine-to-Machine
communications (M2M).”
NFV White Paper, October 2012
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NFV and Network Slicing
• In a resource-centric viewpoint,
a Network Slice can be
represented as a Network Service
instance or a concatenation of
Network Service instances.
• The virtualized resources for a
slice subnet and their connectivity
to physical resources can be
represented by a nested Network
Service, or one or more VNFs and
PNFs directly attached to the
Network Service used by
the network slice.
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Architectural concepts
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The NFVI is a distributed infrastructure
• An NFV Infrastructure comprises one or more points of
presence and is thus a Distributed Cloud (sometimes
referred to as a Telco Cloud)
• Examples of NFVI point of presences include
• Highly centralized data centres (DCs)
• Local / Regional network points of presence (PoPs)
• … and Customer Premises
• The location of a virtualised network function has a direct
impact on the end-to-end quality of experience (latency):
• Rule of thumb: Date plane functions (e.g. CDN) in local/regional
PoPs, control functions (e.g. IMS) in DCs
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A distributed NFVI rather than a huge
centralized Cloud
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A data model driven system
NFV management and orchestration
procedures are driven by a set of machine
readable deployment templates that include:
• Resource Requirements
• Deployment Constraints
• Lifecycle management policies and scripts
High automation of network operations and
• monitoring is expected to reduce:
• The time to deployment - in minutes rather than
months
• The time to repair
• and the risk of misconfigurations
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VNFs, VNF components and Virtualisation
Containers
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Options for the Virtualisation Layer
Hypervisor
• Enables VNF providers to choose the VNF’s OS, which can be a
qualified OS or a “Just Enough Operating System”, depending on
desired instantiation time and memory footprint
OS Containers
• OS imposed by the infrastructure provider (e.g. Linux / Docker)
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Open Source landscape for NFV (non-
exhaustive list)
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Quizz 2
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Nested Virtualisation
The virtualisation layer may be composed of multiple nested sub-layers, each
using a different virtualisation technology.
• Top sub-layer: Visible to the VIM, The partitions it creates provide the role of
the NFV “virtualisation container”.
• Other sub-layers: May or may not be visible to the VIM
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Container Infrastructure Service
Management
• Some de-facto industry solutions enable a 1-N mapping between VNFC instances and
Containers.
• Impact on NFV-MANO under study in ETSI GR NFV-IFA 029 (NFV Release 3).
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VNF to VNF interfaces
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Virtual Link vs. Virtual Network
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Basic communication patterns (hypervisor
case)
• Many more options
(including communication via
shared memory)
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Overlay technologies in NFV
Virtual Links between VNFC
instances are deployed as overlay
tunnels between
vSwitches/vRouters in NFVI Nodes
and Gateways to the WANs.
Widely used, to minimize
configuration needs on physical
routers in an NFVI each time
a virtualisation container is created.
−These routers form the underlay
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