NETCOM Research Group

ETSI has just released the results of its two-week NFV Plugtests™ event that took place from 23 January to 3 February at the 5TONIC laboratory in Madrid, Spain. For features such as network service on-boarding, instantiation and termination, 98% of the interoperability tests succeeded. For more complex operations like scaling and network service updates, very encouraging initial results were observed. The test plan, overall results and lessons learnt during the Plugtests are fed back to ETSI NFV ISG.

35 commercial and open source implementations were tested for interoperability, including 15 virtual network functions, 9 management and orchestration solutions and 11 NFV platforms. More than 160 engineers were involved in the preparation of the Plugtests, 80 of them on-site, coming from a diverse community of NFV implementers, including vendors and key Open Source projects such as ETSI OSM, Open Baton, OPEN-O and OPNFV.

In a pre-testing and remote integration phase launched in November 2016, 29 remote labs were connected to the ETSI Plugtests network to ensure interconnection and integration among the different Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), Management and Orchestration (MANO) solutions and NFV platforms participating in the Plugtests.

During the two week intense testing phase, test sessions were organized in several parallel tracks, ensuring that all participants had at least one test session scheduled any time and that a maximum number of combinations could be tested. Each day 10 different combinations of MANO and VIM&NFVI (NFV platform) were scheduled, with up to 4 VNFs to be tested on each of them during the day. Overall, 160 different combinations of VNF, MANO and VIM&NFVI were tested for interoperability and over 1500 individual test results were reported.

The test plan developed by ETSI’s Center for Testing and Interoperability, focused on validating «ETSI NFV Release 2» end-to-end capabilities including management of descriptors and software images, as well as life cycle management of network services and virtual network functions. It consisted of 26 test cases, classified in several groups going from onboarding and instantiation, through different types of scaling and network service updates to terminate and teardown operations.

“The results for the setup and termination groups were near perfect, achieving almost 100% success for both”, says Pierre Lynch, vice chairman of the NFV Testing, Implementation and Open Source working group. “The results for the 3 other groups, while encouraging, showed that there is still work to be done on those areas. But this is to be expected, since the scale operations are quite complex, and the specifications have not been completed yet. Receiving feedback on the stage 2 specifications is valuable for the ETSI NFV ISG as they are currently working on data modelling and can take those into account.”

The first ETSI NFV Plugtests report is available here (PDF  |  1790 KB)

Event participants outside the IMDEA Networks building, the Madrid-based research institute that hosts the 5TONIC lab.