Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) facilitates the development and evolution of NFV components across various open source ecosystems. Network functions Visualization or NFV is a network architecture concept that virtualizes entire classes of virtual node functions for creating communicating services. Nokia OPNFV creates a reference NFV platform that helps accelerate the transformation of enterprise and service provider networks. The best thing about it is that this platform is open to all.
Recently the Linux Foundation announced that it would release an OPNFV verification program that will help make the commercial Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) a lot easier. It helps the service providers to simplify their hardware inventories and hardware automation. This has made the open source initiative essential for accelerating deployments. The open source initiatives can validate and verify the NFV deployments.
The purpose of the OPNFV verified program (OVP) is to verify NFV infrastructure through a predefined set of test cases using the Dovetail test suite. This test makes the platform vendors be sure that the functionality is available. This also makes the integration system faster and inevitably lowers the number of vendors it locks in. When the program started, many people were skeptical about it, although nobody could deny that this program would be very beneficial and challenging simultaneously.
The process of determining the verification is a really complex and challenging issue. However, Nokia played a major role in getting this program started in the first place. The OPNFV plugfests came into contact with this problem but have so far failed to solve it. What Nokia did was that it provided an open and scalable OCP based compute platform, installed the latest OPNFV release and ran the latest Dovetail version. This programme expectedly did not run smoothly and they had to fix some bugs. But Nokia has become one of the first companies to have received the artificial OPNFV verified mark.
