1. NFV Orchestration – Managing VNFs in Data Center and Branch
John Malzahn – Host, Senior Manager, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions Marketing, Cisco Systems
Song Toh – Senior Manager, Product Management, Cisco Systems
Kjetil Rossavik – Product Manager, Cisco Systems
November 9, 2017

2. Today’s Presenters John Malzahn Song Toh Kjetil Rossavik
Senior Manager, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions Marketing,
Cisco Systems
Song Toh
Senior Manager, Product Management, Cisco Systems
Kjetil Rossavik
Product Manager,
Cisco Systems

3. Agenda 1 2 3 Market Trends in Automation and NFV
Automating NFV with Cisco NSO and ESC 2
Sharing our NFV Experience 3

4. Market Trends in Automation and NFV

5. Key Market Trend Observations
Changing customer behavior and new expectations
Execution at the speed of software
Rapidly changing business models
Agility, DevOps, NFV, SDN, new services platforms
Everything on demand
New services with a press of a button
Cloud services, virtualization, programmable networks
New ecosystems and value chains
OTT Co-opetition
All of this requires successful, flexible automation.
But complexity has destroyed many automation initiatives.
Let’s set the stage by talking about the business challenges that operators tell us they’re facing today.
First, we’re seeing changing customer behavior and expectations.
More than ever, customers expect speed. They want to be able to capitalize on new opportunities and enter new markets much faster, responding to changes and competition in real time. All of that comes down to agility, and they’re counting on service providers to help give it to them.
When a customer has a need, they can’t wait weeks or months anymore for an operator to design and deploy a new service for them. They need everything on demand, and the ability to implement new network services with the press of a button.
Along these lines, operators are dealing with rapidly changing business models.
New technology innovations like virtualization, programmable networks, and cloud services are changing the way customers do business, as well as their expectations about how they interact with the companies providing services.
New ecosystems and value chains have evolved in the last few years, and if operators are going to support their customers, they need to be able to participate in them.
In this dynamic environment, you may be competing against some of these “over-the-top” (OTT) service and content providers one day while partnering with them the next.
So on the one hand, you need to develop some of the same kinds of capabilities that OTT providers can deliver. On the other hand, you need an infrastructure that’s open and flexible enough to integrate these capabilities into your customers’ evolving business models.
All of this supports a central requirement: the ability to execute at the speed of software.
A good example is the emerging DevOps model that many businesses are adopting, where developers and network operations teams work closely together across the service lifecycle to take ideas from conception to activation in a few weeks --- or even a few days.
That’s the kind of agility customers want, and they’re looking to a range of new technology innovations—network programmability, NFV, SDN, and others—to achieve it.
But as you know, programmability and NFV—not to mention new DevOps models—are very different from the way network service delivery has happened in the past.
It all comes down to automation.
Ideally, you should be able to use programmable networks and virtualized resources to deliver much faster, on-demand services.
But to do that, everything has to be automated—you can’t rely on lengthy, error-prone manual processes and custom OSS coding efforts to set up, change, and tear down network services.
Automation is not a new goal. But the incredible complexity of today’s environments presents a major roadblock to achieving it.
If you look through the stories of operators and enterprises that have tried to automate and not gotten the results they were hoping for, complexity is the biggest reason.

6. The Four Pillars of Orchestration https://communities. cisco
Orchestration Across Multiple Domains 1 2
State Convergence 3 4
Data Models and Data Model Mapping
Orchestrated Assurance
Foundation for Full Lifecycle Service Automation
We have been speaking to customers and the broader networking industry about the Four Pillars of Orchestration, highlighting the capabilities that makes up the foundation for full lifecycle service automation.
These were articulated in a whitepaper “Architecture for Lifecycle Service Automation:”, comprehensive at 23 pages, and available for download from Cisco.com.
There are also four Cisco Knowledge Network one hour webinars, one for each of these topics, and the recordings are available from the link in the slide heading.
As we look at NFV, it is that much more important to orchestrate across domains, including physical and virtual devices, achieve service consistency with minimal code, and the ability to orchestrate assurance and activation testing, so the value propositions of NFV can be realized.

7. NSO System Overview NSO Service Manager Package Manager ESC (VNFM)
Model-driven end-to- end service lifecycle and customer experience in focus
Seamless integration with existing and future OSS/BSS environment
Loosely-coupled and modular architecture leveraging open APIs and standard protocols
Orchestration across multi-domain and multi- layer for centralized policy and services across entire network
NSO
Service Manager
Package
Manager
ESC (VNFM)
VNF Lifecycle Manager
Multi-domain Networks
Device Abstraction
NED
Operations
OSS/BSS
Developers
VNF Service Monitoring
Device Manager
CDB
Here we look at Cisco NSO as the platform that enable model-driven and end to end service lifecycle automation.
The architecture of NSO supports OSS/BSS or ITSM tool integration through standard-based APIs.
With integrated ESC to provide VNF Manager capability, NSO is uniquely suited to automate and orchestrate not only your traditional network services, but also new services based on a mix of physical and virtual network functions.

8. The Journey to Production-Ready NFV
Look, so many VNFs!
I can deploy them on demand!
I can manage most VNFs like I did my PNFs, easier transition?
Every VNF has its own management stack?
Every VNF has a different provisioning process?
More moving parts and more complexity!
How do I operationalize multi-vendor NFV-based services?
Expectation
Time
These are now true.
Standard-based NFV orchestration that automate multi-vendor VNF deployment and LCM
Platform that can stitch together multiple VNFs to present a service
Onboard a VNF without writing code
Single platform to orchestrate VNF deployment across data center, branch and cloud
NFV
Disillusionment
Enlightenment & Productivity
NFV is cool new tech!
VNFs are cheaper!
No more vendor lock-in!
Massive OPEX reduction!
You might be familiar with this graphic template.
I will use it to illustrate (may be simplistically) how the expectation and understanding of NFV deployment has evolved over time.

9. What slowed down NFV? Standards
Immaturity standards such as ETSI NFV MANO
Lacking standards- compliant products
Inter-operability of products
Technology
Need multi-vendor support
Ability to manage both virtual and physical functions
Complex resource management
Insufficient monitoring and recovery
Skills
Understanding complexity of virtualized environments
Need software skills in engineering and ops
Let’s review what has kept the industry from realizing the value of NFV, whether it is in Enterprise or Service Providers:
Standardization is a slow process, and the NFV related standards are still not fully defined. E.g. the exact format of the descriptors – the NS descriptor and the VNF descriptor – are not set, while competing alternatives are being debated.
This in turn means that there is a lack of standards compliant products, where some vendors have chosen to create more monolithic implementations, rather than supporting the emerging open interfaces
And this leads to lack of interoperability of products
Management of multi-vendor networks is always an issue, and we see a number of vendors supporting their own VNFs, but not VNFs from 3rd parties
Some hardware vendors have acquired NFV management and orchestration startup companies and added their products to their portfolios, resulting in separate solutions for the virtual and physical worlds, while the two worlds co-reside as one in the actual network.
Running network functions on x86 hardware you have to make sure that the required resources, in terms of CPU and memory are available, and automation systems so far have had limited resource management
NFV adds new sources of failure, and hence has additional requirements on monitoring and recovery. It is essential to have monitoring and recovery not only of each component, but of the end-to-end service. We have had recent CKN webinars specifically on this topic, which we refer to as Orchestrated Assurance.
There is also a skills gap. It is not trivial to stand up e.g. an OpenStack environment, and it is hard to find and hire people who know how to do this
It is also hard to hire software experts, especially the rare combination of software and networking skills

10. Automating NFV with Cisco Network Services Orchestrator
Implementing NFV is a journey, rather than a single project milestone.
Over the last 5 years or so, we have been working with a number of customers who have been going through this journey, and we, and they, wear the battle-scars to prove it.
So now we would like to share with you how together with our customers we have automated NFV deployments, so they are ready for production and scaled out use cases.
Realistically NFV is successful not when you can manage 10 or 20 VNFs, but when you have hundreds or thousands of VNFs across multiple data center and branches, where they are needed.

11. Cisco NFVO Solution Mapped to ETSI NFV Framework
Services API
ETSI NFV Framework
Portal / BSS
“Day0”
NFV Management & Orchestration
Os-Ma
Service Applications
“Day1, N”
Se-Ma
NSO
Service Orchestration and Fulfillment
Service, VNF & Infrastructure Description
NSO (NFV-O)
NFV-O (NFV Orch.)
EMS 1
EMS 2
EMS 3
Ve-Vnfm
VNF 1
vCSR F5
vASA
VNF 2
VNF 3
Nfvo-Vnfm
VM Alive
Physical
Network
Vn-Nf
VNF-M (VNF Manager)F Managers)
ESC
(VNF-M)
VNF-M (VNF Managers)
NFVI
On-Vi
KVM / ESXi
Virtual Storage
Virtual Network
Nf-Vi
Vnfm-Vi
Virtualization Layer
Virtual Infra Manager
OpenStack/
vCenter/NFVIS /AWS (VIM)
Hardware Resources
Compute
Storage
Network
The standards have come a long way, and it is now possible to build solutions based on these, while filling the gaps where the standards are incomplete
Note that the world according to ETSI is completely virtualized – physical devices are not considered here
Virtual Network Functions execute on NFV-infrastructure, or NFVI
NFVI is managed by Virtual Infrastructure Manager, or VIM
VNFs are managed by VNF-managers
Everything is orchestrated by the NFV-orchestrator
The Cisco solution is probably the most standards compliant on the market, and interoperatiblity with other vendors has been proven e.g. at the ETSI PlugTest in Madrid last January, as well as in a number of customer networks.
It offers Network Services Orchestrator as the NFVO,
Elastic Services Controller as the VNFM
The VIM can be OpenStack, VMWare vCenter, or Cisco ENCS, or a public cloud service such as Amazon AWS
There is a broad range of Cisco VNFs, and the solution also supports 3rd party VNFs
So the NFV orchestrator orders the VNF manager to get the VIM to spin up VNF instances on a NFV infrastructure. As the VNFs come up, the VNF manager reports “VM alive” to the NFV orchestrator. The VNFs now have bootstrap, or day-0 configuration, so that they are reachable from the automation system.
Once a VNF is up and running, you may want to apply a base configuration, sometimes referred to as a golden configuration. You may also periodically want to run compliance checks in order to ensure that the golden config remains intact.
You may also want to apply service configuration, e.g. firewall rules, SD-WAN configuration, etc. etc.
But a network service usually involves both virtual and physical devices, and both base configuration and service configuration applies equally to physical devices as to VNFs, so the same NSO automation can be used.
Note: Even if ETSI standard is not your main concern, this modular approach to address VNF lifecycle and network service configuration allows you to automate your network services end-to-end, without technology locked in, and free you from dealing with siloed tools for every network function.

12. Productized function packs for NFVO and ENFV
NFVO / vBranch Function Pack
Productized function packs for NFVO and ENFV
Network Services Orchestrator
Function packs reduce development
cost and accelerate deployment of
NFV in Data Center, Branch, or
Public Cloud
In previous Cisco Knowledge Networks webinars we have described and demonstrated how to create NFVO functionality with Cisco NSO
Now, since recently, we have created productized function packs implementing the NFVO functionality to help accelerate deployment of NFV anywhere needed in the network - in the datacenter, in the branch office, or in the public cloud
So let’s have a look at an example of how this is used.

13. Example: Virtualizing the Branch office
Previous webnars have shown NFVO in the datacenter – see e.g. the webinars called The Four Pillars of Orchestration, and particularly the Stateful Convergence webinar – there was a link on a previous slide.
And we demonstrated extending from private to public cloud at the Layer123 NFV conference in The Hague last month.
The demo recording is also available on the NSO Developer Hub, which I will talk about in a bit.
Let’s now explore an example of deploying NFV in enterprise branch offices

14. Cisco Enterprise Network Function Virtualization (ENFV) Simplify operations Roll out Services in Minutes Less Space, Less Power Less Maintenance Increased Uptime Manage Centrally Automate
Enterprise branch offices today have a device per function - router, firewall, WAN acceleration, etc.
To add another function, add another device.
Each device has to be shipped to the site, and often someone has to go and plug it in, and put it into operation.
Virtualization allows the enterprise or managed services operator to
deploy and operationalize network functions remotely and automatically,
reduce implementation time and operating expenses.

15. ENFV Automated Operations - I Branch CPE fully operational in minutes
Customer or Operator Portal
1. Pre-provision CPE
Select branch template and enter device serial#
NSO vBranch FP
3. PnP request
2. Configure PnP
4+. Configure CPE and VNFs
CPE
A fully automated solution allows turning up an entire branch office in a matter of minutes.
You can also automatically modify an existing virtual branch, in order to add another network function
In the example let us assume that the CPE device to host the VNFs has not yet arrived at the branch site.
An operator pre-provisions the branch by selecting a template which defines which VNFs and how they are connected in a topology, or service chain
The operator also provides the serial number of the device that is expected there.
The device is configured to enable PnP, either before it is shipped, or on site
Then when the device is plugged in, it announces itself to the NSO server, and then the device is configured, and the VNFs are created and connected together.
Optionally, the automation system can also apply a service configuration, e.g. firewall rules
This is what we are going to show in the demo in a minute

16. Configuring the System prior to Operations
No programming required – configuration only
Configuring the System prior to Operations
The previous slide illustrates how to turn up branch sites in a fully automated fashion
How do we reach this level of automation?
The NSO vBranch Function Pack provides all you need
Most scenarios can be achieved without any programming – you only require configuration
And, with NSO vBranch Function Pack, you can automate the deployment of VNFs for multiple enterprise tenants, and many branches for each tenant.

17. Minimal System Configuration Required
VNF
VNF
VNF
VNFD
Bootstrap configuration
NFVIS
Bootstrap configuration
Base configuration
To configure your NSO-based Enterprise NFV automation system, what you need is:
VNF descriptors for each of the VNFs that you are going to use
Bootstrap and base configuration for the branch CPE
Bootstrap configuration for the VNFs
And optionally service configuration for the VNFs

18. Minimal System Configuration Required
Common VNFDs Come with NSO vBranch FP
Others can be added
Examples included
VNF
VNF
VNF
VNFD
Bootstrap configuration
NFVIS
Bootstrap configuration
Base configuration
Examples included
Note that the NSO vBranch Function Pack includes examples of each of these items

19. DEMO TIME!
Now let us look at a demo of this.

20. Customer or Operator Portal
Recap: ENFV Automated Operations Branch CPE fully operational in minutes
Customer or Operator Portal
1. Pre-provision CPE
Select branch template and enter device serial#
NSO vBranch FP
3. PnP request
2. Configure PnP
4+. Configure CPE and VNFs
CPE
So to recap,
We pre-provisioned the branch, even before the ENCS CPE arrived on site
When it arrived, it announced itself to the PnP server in NSO
Then NSO configured the ENCS device itself
It instructed the ENCS to download Cisco ISRv and Fortinet virtual firewall images
It started the virtual machines with a bootstrap configuration
And then it applied service configuration to the virtual devices.
All of this happened fully automatically, without any manual invervention

21. Sharing our NFV Experience
So let’s start wrapping up

22. Conclusions: Current State of NFV
NFV, after some false starts, is finally taking off
Standards are maturing, interoperability is increasing
Automation is key, and automation solutions are available, e.g. Cisco Network Services Orchestrator
Look out for proof-points for
Standards compliance/interoperability/multi-vendor
NFV in branch, data center and public cloud
Virtual and physical automation
Resource management
Orchestrated assurance
Recovery of both VNF and service configuration

23. Cisco to Automate NTT DOCOMO’s Network Device Provisioning
NTT East Japan Adopts Cisco NFV Portfolio for Small and Medium Enterprises of ICT Cloud Computing
Cisco to Automate NTT DOCOMO’s Network Device Provisioning
BT and Cisco accelerate partnership for future networks 
SoftBank Accelerates Service Delivery to Customers Using Virtualization and Automation Software from Cisco
Ericsson and Cisco to virtualize Vodafone Hutchison Australia's core and IP network
Here are some customer

24. NSO DevNet – Key Highlights www.cisco.com/go/nsodevnet
The one place to use for sharing, finding and collaborating on NSO public knowledge!
Light start through DevNet content page and Learning- Labs
Constant news and updates to help you keep up to date
Large searchable content pool
Cisco customers, partners and employees all have access
Got a question, ask! We will help ensure a fast response
Easy to share and find public content
Code sharing through public GitHub
Reach it here:

25. For more information www.cisco.com/go/nso Visit:
and contact your Cisco account representatives
Thank you for spending time with us today. We look forward to working with you in this fast growing market.

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