ETSI Tees Up Second NFV Plugtests

ETSI is looking to build upon the success of its first NFV Plugtests earlier this year by hosting another round in January.

ETSI's next series of Plugtests are slated for Sophia Antipolis, France on January 15-19. Like the first Plugtests that were held this past March in Spain, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) said the second iteration would continue to drill down on multiparty interoperability testing with vendors and open source groups.

The Plugtest participants will evaluate the level of interoperability of their implementations, as well as confirm that they are following the NFV specifications that have been laid out by ETSI. The open source communities taking part in the next Plugtest include Open Source MANO Community (OSM) , Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. , OpenStack and Open Baton.

Plugtest attendees will look to build upon the first edition in March that posted a 98% success rate for interoperability tests across network service onboarding, setup and termination. (See NFV Interoperability Leaps Forward at ETSI NFV Plugtests Event.)

In January, ETSI and the other parties will examine the key components of NFV deployments, including VNFs, NFVi and virtual infrastructure managers (VIMs), as well as management and orchestration (MANO) implementations. The interoperability test sessions will include combining the various VNFs, MANO elements and NFV platforms. (See also CableLabs Hails Major ETSI NFV Milestone.)

The Linux Foundation's Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, which combined AT&T's ECOMP with OPEN-O, also addresses MANO. As service providers move out of proof-of-concept trials (PoCs) and into real-world deployments, they are focusing more on defining MANO, according to a recent Heavy Reading report. In the report, Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Roz Roseboro noted that service providers were moving forward with their NFV rollouts despite a lack of standards for MANO. (See MANO's Key Value Proposition Is to Automate Operations.)

Next year's Plugtests will also include multi-site operation, network path, enhanced platform awareness, fault and performance management and NFV application programming interfaces, among other elements.

ETSI said a key element of the Plugtests would be the "continuous and ubiquitous testing environment." Based on the ETSI Hub for Interoperability and Validation (HIVE), ETSI plans to enable remote integration and pre-testing for the event. Its lineup will also include further collaborative testing and validation activities, such as remote interoperability testing, PoCs and demos or API validation during and between the NFV Plugtests events.

— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation