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A community-led compliance and verification program to improve quality and interoperability in the NFV ecosystem.

Network functions virtualization (NFV) and software- defined networking (SDN) offer service providers increased service agility, OpEx improvements, and back-office automation. Disaggregation, the approach of decoupling the various layers of the stack, from hardware, to NFVI/VIM software, to dataplane acceleration, SDN controllers, MANO components, and VNFs, enables multi-vendor deployments with best-of-breed options at each layer.

Interoperability has always been a challenge, and as the number of vendors and interfaces between layers increases, those interoperability challenges increase proportionally. In response, OPNFV launched the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) in early 2018, focusing on commercial NFVI/VIM product offerings. Around that same time ONAP began activities in its Beijing and Casablanca releases to focus on compliance activities for VNF vendors.

As ONAP and OPNFV (as well as several other open source networking projects) have now come together under the LF Networking (LFN) umbrella, they have joined forces to add VNF compliance testing to OVP. This program is the first of its kind to combine automated compliance and verification testing for multiple parts of the NFV stack. OVP provides testing of commercial products built on top of the requirements from the ONAP VNF Requirements project, multiple SDOs such as ETSI and GSMA, and the LF Networking End User Advisory Group (EUAG). OVP has also introduced a Verified Labs program.

This new whitepaper provides a guide for understanding the OPNFV Verification Program, how to get involved, and how to complete verification on your NFVI and VNF products and services.

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