4.1. VNF Design
Services are composed of VNFs and common components and are designed to be agnostic of the location to leverage capacity where it exists in the Network Cloud. VNFs can be instantiated in any location that meets the performance and latency requirements of the service.
A key design principle for virtualizing services is decomposition of network functions using NFV concepts into granular VNFs. This enables instantiating and customizing only essential functions as needed for the service, thereby making service delivery more nimble. It provides flexibility of sizing and scaling and also provides flexibility with packaging and deploying VNFs as needed for the service. It enables grouping functions in a common cloud data center to minimize inter-component latency. The VNFs should be designed with a goal of being modular and reusable to enable using best-in-breed vendors.
Section 4.1 VNF Design in VNF Guidelines describes the overall guidelines for designing VNFs from VNF Components (VNFCs). Below are more detailed requirements for composing VNFs.
VNF Design Requirements
Requirement: R-58421
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The VNF SHOULD be decomposed into granular re-usable VNFCs. |
Requirement: R-82223
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The VNF MUST be decomposed if the functions have significantly different scaling characteristics (e.g., signaling versus media functions, control versus data plane functions). |
Requirement: R-16496
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The VNF MUST enable instantiating only the functionality that is needed for the decomposed VNF (e.g., if transcoding is not needed it should not be instantiated). |
Requirement: R-02360
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The VNFC MUST be designed as a standalone, executable process. |
Requirement: R-34484
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The VNF SHOULD create a single component VNF for VNFCs that can be used by other VNFs. |
Requirement: R-23035
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The VNF MUST be designed to scale horizontally (more instances of a VNF or VNFC) and not vertically (moving the existing instances to larger VMs or increasing the resources within a VM) to achieve effective utilization of cloud resources. |
Requirement: R-30650
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The VNF MUST utilize cloud provided infrastructure and VNFs (e.g., virtualized Local Load Balancer) as part of the VNF so that the cloud can manage and provide a consistent service resiliency and methods across all VNF’s. |
Requirement: R-12709
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The VNFC SHOULD be independently deployed, configured, upgraded, scaled, monitored, and administered by ONAP. |
Requirement: R-37692
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The VNFC MUST provide API versioning to allow for independent upgrades of VNFC. |
Requirement: R-86585
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The VNFC SHOULD minimize the use of state within a VNFC to facilitate the movement of traffic from one instance to another. |
Requirement: R-65134
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The VNF SHOULD maintain state in a geographically redundant datastore that may, in fact, be its own VNFC. |
Requirement: R-75850
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The VNF SHOULD decouple persistent data from the VNFC and keep it in its own datastore that can be reached by all instances of the VNFC requiring the data. |
Requirement: R-88199
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The VNF MUST utilize a persistent datastore service that can meet the data performance/latency requirements. (For example: Datastore service could be a VNFC in VNF or a DBaaS in the Cloud execution environment) |
Requirement: R-99656
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The VNF MUST NOT terminate stable sessions if a VNFC instance fails. |
Requirement: R-84473
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The VNF MUST enable DPDK in the guest OS for VNF’s requiring high packets/sec performance. High packet throughput is defined as greater than 500K packets/sec. |
Requirement: R-54430
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The VNF MUST use the NCSP’s supported library and compute flavor that supports DPDK to optimize network efficiency if using DPDK. 1 |
Requirement: R-18864
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The VNF MUST NOT use technologies that bypass virtualization layers (such as SR-IOV) unless approved by the NCSP (e.g., if necessary to meet functional or performance requirements). |
Requirement: R-64768
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The VNF MUST limit the size of application data packets to no larger than 9000 bytes for SDN network-based tunneling when guest data packets are transported between tunnel endpoints that support guest logical networks. |
Requirement: R-74481
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The VNF MUST NOT require the use of a dynamic routing protocol unless necessary to meet functional requirements. |
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Refer to NCSP’s Network Cloud specification