The vCloud NFV platform components are used by a variety of VMware customers from industries such as large enterprise, health care, and finance. Carrier grade capabilities are continuously added to the platform to address the requirements of VMware CSP customers. With this release, improvements in high availability and performance are fundamental to the vCloud NFV design.
Improving the data plane forwarding performance of the platform to meet carrier grade requirements for specific VNFs such as vEPC and vRouter is accomplished by providing dedicated CPU resources where needed, and identifying and resolving slow data plane paths. VMware vCloud NFV 2.0 includes specific functionality to enable VNFs that require precise and dedicate resource allocation to receive it.
The carrier grade design principle of High Availability (HA) is divided into two different layers in the NFV environment:
- Platform High Availability. Platform HA ensures that the components needed to manage the NFV environment are always configured in a redundant fashion, replicating data across multiple storage elements and databases. Ensuring that the management components in the platform are always available and self-healing allows the operations team to focus on the services and service constructs.
- VNF High Availability. The vCloud NFV platform provides native resiliency functions that can be consumed by VNFs to increase their availability. For VNFs that do not provide their own high availability mechanisms, VMware vCloud NFV 2.0 offers advanced support to ensure that a VNF component failure can be quickly recovered and the boot sequence orchestrated to meet the VNF logic.
With these two availability principles, both the NFV platform and VNFs minimize service disruption.
