Mano and Monitoring: Two bumps on the road to SDN/NFV

NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) is the stack formed by three major elements: NFV Orchestrator (NFVO), VNF Manager (VNFM) and Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM). MANO is key when it comes to deploying different Network Services. This explains why all Communication Service Providers (CSPs) were waiting for the rapid completion of the different MANO standards which only happened in Q3 2016.

In terms of implementation, MANO relies on two main choices: pure Open Source approaches and the commercial deployment of MANO stacks provided by vendors. We think that it is worth taking a look at both options considering the CSP requirements, the problems to solve and the deployment maturity. In this document, we describe the following proposals, under the two mentioned options:

• Open Source solutions: OSM (Open Source MANO) which is one of the most important Open Source initiatives, ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform), and Cloudify MANO.
• Vendors’ proprietary solutions: the Ericsson proprietary MANO solution called ECM (Ericsson Cloud Manager) and Nokia’s MANO proprietary implementation called CloudBand among others.

Moreover, the NFV/SDN inherent multi-layer infrastructure requires an evolved monitoring approach relying on the following 4 key aspects: Multilayer (covering all layers), Multivendor, Real-Time Analytics capability and end-to-end Active service monitoring. The dependencies among all entities from the multiple layers have to be well defined within the interlayer data model.