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How to understand NFV, many novices are not very clear about this, in order to help you solve this problem, the following editor will explain for you in detail, people with this need can come to learn, I hope you can gain something.

The real landing of Network function Virtualization (NFV) still needs some time of research and development, because NFV not only needs to achieve automation and integration into the existing management system, but also needs to be more portable.

NFV can manipulate network elements in an easy-to-use way, including enabling, disabling, automating, and orchestrating. Network elements refer to switches, routers, firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), monitoring, port mirroring, and even an entire cluster of virtual or physical server instances.

These network functions can be deployed in single or multiple virtual machines, and hardware devices can also be used. As for which deployment method to adopt, it also depends on the specific application scenario. If you need to deploy a new feature, the most effective way is to deploy it on a new virtual machine.

Build a reasonable slicing network

In the process of working with the Yottabyte team, I can't help but feel the feeling of appreciation. In the world of Yottabyte, everything is about "virtual environments". Each virtual environment has its own dedicated storage, storage strategy, virtual machine, and so on. More crucially, each virtual environment has a NFV VM that provides basic routing, firewall, and NAT functions.

Service providers, including Yottabyte, usually create only one virtual environment for one customer, but there is no limit to the number of virtual environments the customer can have, depending on the way the cloud provider handles NFV.

As far as I know, some OpenStack cloud providers cut the network in a very similar way to Yottabyte's virtual environment. Once users sign up on the cloud platform, they can get some storage space and a NFV VM. At the same time, users can add more NFV elements according to their needs. Similarly, if you register on Microsoft's Azure, you will get some storage space and a NFV VM accordingly. Of course, you can create multiple NFV VM, but the Azure is less transparent.

In fact, a "virtual slice" of NFV VM can handle multiple users, and in my opinion, Microsoft can not achieve this function, mainly because Microsoft is loyal to using Windows, and Windows does not have the technology to implement this function. Therefore, the claim that there is a multi-tenant feature in the RRAS of Windows Server 2012 R2 is probably just a cover.

However, in the Linux world, you can see that "multi-tenant NFV" is increasingly being containerized. A single NFV VM provides services in a multi-tenant mode (firewalls and load balancers usually have the ability to do this), while other services (such as IDS and monitoring) are provided through containerized instances.

Resource problem and Experimental Environment

I learned from the cloud provider that the administrator of the virtual environment does not know exactly how many resources to allocate to the application's virtual machine, nor does he know how to select the appropriate size of the instance. Any team that wants to implement NFV needs to know exactly how many resources are needed to perform a given task.

Practice shows that the quickest way for managers to understand NFV is to do experiments. You can choose Linux or Windows virtual machine as network edge devices. So what kind of resources do you choose to deploy a small experimental environment like NFV VM?

Microsoft seems to have a dominant position because its Nano Server is well accepted in the market, and Windows supports running NFV, and has management and configuration tools. But deploying NFV is still onerous for the operating system.

As for Linux, most mainstream versions are also highly used, even with "minimal" installations. Of course, the systems of some small brands lack marketing budget and brand awareness, and are often more difficult to operate.

This will lead to the rise of third-party NFV, and even Microsoft may choose a third-party platform to develop NFV rather than involve itself.

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