The five architectural pillars on which VMware vCloud NFV 2.0 stands are driven by VMware customer requirements and the individual component capabilities. These are described in more detail in the following sections of this document.
Carrier Grade 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.
Modularity Architecting vCloud NFV using well defined modules allows the CSP to accelerate deployment and reliably expand it when needed. The vCloud NFV components are grouped into three distinct containments.
Service Life Cycle The service life cycle design principle focuses on ease, and the speed at which VNFs can be consumed by the NFV platform, maintained over their life time, and deployed when needed. The VIM facilitates this approach and enables the CSP to perform common tasks to benefit from virtualizing network functions.
Tenant Based Architecture The NFVI is shared between multiple entities, referred to as tenants of the NFVI. A fundamental aspect of the design is ensuring that multiple tenants remain logically isolated from each other, although the physical and virtual layers they use may be shared.
Integrated Operational Management The multilayer, multi-vendor nature of the NFV environment can lead to increase operational management complexity. To resolve this complexity, vCloud NFV is integrated with a robust operational management system that monitors and analyzes components involved in the NFV environment. When the physical servers and switches include monitoring adaptors for the VMware operational management components, the entire system, including the virtualization layer and the VNF themselves, can be automatically discovered, monitored, and analyzed.