A pattern for an NFV virtual machine environment

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a recent technology with a high velocity of innovation. It leverages virtualization technology to offer network functions such as firewalls, load balancers, and switches, as software services rather than being hardware as it is in traditional network infrastructures. A key component of virtualization technology is the hypervisor, which is a collection of software modules that provide virtualization of hardware resources and thus enable several virtual machines (VMs) to be run on a single physical server. The hypervisor resides within a Virtual Machine Environment (VME), which is an environment where VMs can be created to run applications (network functions), functionally equivalent to the original machine (computer) environment. We present here a pattern for a virtual machine environment of NFV, which describes the architecture where VMs are created and managed for the purposes of NFV; the created VMs can be used to create virtualized network functions (VNFs).