Carrier grade attributes are injected into every layer of the vCloud NFV platform. High availability that is a core pillar in the architecture and a crucial requirement in every CSP network, spans the entire platform. When discussing management components of the platform, the various redundancy mechanisms that allow them to be highly available are highlighted, as are details of the ways in which networking elements can be made highly redundant with the use of routing protocols and NIC teaming. The NFVI virtualization layer also provides mechanisms to the Virtual Network Functions to enhance and improve their availability. These include vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), High Availability (HA), and Orchestrated HA. .

Even though tuning the vCloud NFV platform for performance spans the NFVI, VNFs, and VIM, since it is applicable to specific VNFs, performance architecture recommendations are grouped in this section.