NFV Infrastructure

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) system consists of three key Infrastructure elements. These elements are:

• NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure)
• VNFs (Virtual Network Functions)
• MANO (Management and Orchestration)

Let’s talk about each of these NFV Infrastructure Elements one by one.

Table of Contents

NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure)

NFVI (Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure) consists of hardware and software elements of the network. NFVI has three sub parts, these parts are:

• Hardware Resources
• Virtualization Layer
• Virtual Resources

To start with Hardware Resources, they consist of hardwares of network devices,servers, storage etc. These hardare resources are shared and used by VNFs (Virtual Network Functions).

Secondly, Virtualization Layer is the place that virtualization is done. In other words, Virtualization Layer is the layer of Hypervisor.

Thirdly , Virtual Resources like Virtual Network, Virtual Storages and Virtual Servers are above this part.

Virtualization Layer decouples the hardware resources of the NFVI. It compute, storage and network resources are emulated. It is responsible abstracting the physical resources. And by doing this,
VNF uses this resources as independent.