Previously in our discussion of the Understanding OPNFV book, we provided an introduction to network functions virtualization (NFV) and explored the role of OPNFV in network transformation. We continue our series with a look at chapters 4 and 5, which provide a comprehensive description of the various open source NFV projects integrated by OPNFV and the carrier grade features contributed back to these upstream projects by the community. In this article, we cover these two topics briefly and provide some related excerpts from the Understanding OPNFV book.
For those less familiar with OPNFV, according to the OPNFVwebsite:
Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Through system level integration, deployment and testing, OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform to accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks.
OPNFV is the only open source project that integrates, deploys, and tests a wide range of open source NFV projects on a continuous basis. If you believe that open source is the future of NFV, then OPNFV is a project you definitely want familiarize yourself with.
The list of projects integrated by OPNFV includes the following categories:
- NFV infrastructure (NFVI)
- Hardware
- Virtual compute
- Virtual storage
- Virtual networking and dataplane acceleration
- Virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM)
- SDN Controller
- Management and network orchestration (MANO)
More details on the various projects in each category are outlined in the book. For example, here is an excerpt on the OpenDaylight project: