Vines: A CloudStack Platform for the Orchestration and Holistic Management of Virtualized Network Functions and Services

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is changing the way networks are built and maintained by replacing traditional middleboxes with software that runs on commodity hardware. This paradigm shift not only increases flexibility but can also reduce the cost of building and maintaining the network. The ETSI NFV-MANO reference model is currently widely adopted as the de facto NFV standard, with a large number of compliant platforms currently available. In this work, we propose Vines (Vines Is an NFV-MANO Extensible Solution), a CloudStack-based platform that supports NFV technology and is compliant with the ETSI NFV specifications. Vines includes an NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) that enables the creation of complex network services composed of multiple individual functions. Management & orchestration are holistic, in the sense that they provide a comprehensive set of functionalities for heterogeneous network functions and services. Moreover, nearly all NFV developments have been done on the OpenStack cloud platform. Vines opens up the possibility of using NFV solutions on Apache CloudStack, one of the most widely used cloud platforms worldwide. Experimental results are presented showing that Vines has the same performance level as the widely used OpenStack/Tacker.