Demystifying NFV Infrastructure Hotspots

Slides from the recent Dell NFV Summit 2015 are now available. Steve Wright's 7 Fallacies of NFV talk describes the importance of managing network resources in an NFV stack. The diagram above shows the complex network data paths that result from NFV as packets flow between virtual functions across physical and virtual switches.

The presentation describes how the Fallacies of Distributes Computing apply to NFV, highlighting the importance of effective management of network resources for effective NFV deployment.

Another paper, Demystifying NFV Infrastructure Hotspots by Ramki Krishnan, Anoop Ghanwani, and Michael Tien, demonstrates how industry standard sFlow instrumentation build into physical and virtual switches can provide the comprehensive real-time analytics needed to manage NFV deployments.

The vIMS (virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem) is used as an example. The diagram below shows the functional elements of the logical architecture deployed on the hardware testbed shown above.

sFlow telemetry from the physical switches in the leaf and spine network, virtual switch instances, and hypervisors is streamed to an instance of the sFlow-RT analytics platform.

The dashboard application running on sFlow-RT demonstrates visibility into the traffic flows between virtual network functions.

The final set of charts in the dashboard shows the multi-media traffic flows running across the infrastructure. All elements are monitored and any hotspots are rapidly identified so that corrective actions can be automatically applied by the orchestration system.