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Assessing Interoperability of NFV and Edge Solutions
One of the key events for interoperability testing of NFV environments is certainly the NFV Plugtests organized by the ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability. Spirent has participated in this series from the beginning, the latest of which was the 4th ETSI NFV Plugtests event that took place on June 3-7 at the ETSI premises in Sophia Antipolis, France.
During the one-week event, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) solution providers and open source projects worked together (see ETSI NFV Plugtests report for details) to build combinations of test setups in order to validate interoperability of their various implementations of NFV and MEC specifications and APIs. With 40 organizations and over 200 engineers involved on site and remotely, test sessions covered multi-vendor NFV interoperability, NFV API Conformance and MEC Interoperability, key technologies for 5G.
Realizing Benefits of Virtualized Environments and 5G
Spirent provided Spirent TestCenter Virtual as the Virtual Network Function (VNF) that can be used in Single-Vendor and Multi-Vendor Network Services (NS). It validated end-to-end data plane network connectivity by sending traffic flows or emulated protocol endpoints to verify control plane functionality.
In addition, its latest automated NFV lifecycle validation tool, Spirent CloudSure was deployed during the event. The recently launched solution is the industry’s first standards-based NFV Cloud test platform, which now features a Lifecycle Validation test package alongside NFVi Assurance test packages to help verify:
Quality of VNF service after repeated instantiation/termination cycles
Stability of the NFV virtual environment (trends of the measured lifecycle statistics)
Robustness of lifecycle management operation, e.g. scale in/out operation
The ETSI interoperability event provided a great opportunity for bringing together various solution providers for NFV environments to resolve interoperability challenges and learn about the latest tools for benchmarking and validating NFV and Cloud ecosystems, optimizing performance to realize the benefits of virtualized environments including 5G.
Learn about best practices for validating virtualized infrastructures and how to overcome related challenges.
