A VNF Descriptor Generator for Tacker-based NFV Management and Orchestration

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a concept that is shifting network functions from dedicated hardware to software known as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) running on commodity hardware. The deployment and operational behavior requirements of VNF are described by a deployment template called VNF Descriptor (VNFD). In order to deploy a new VNF, operators and VNF vendors have to manually prepare a VNFD template which may have typos and unexpected errors. To overcome this tedious and error-prone task, we propose a VNFD generator web application to automatically create a VNFD template that the operators and VNF vendors can quickly validate and deploy the VNFs. The experiment is conducted in Tacker, which is an open-source NFV management and orchestration service in the OpenStack cloud platform, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed web application.