1. Definition of terms
Different SDOs and communities use different terminology related to
NFV/Cloud/SDN. This list tries to define an OPNFV terminology,
mapping/translating the OPNFV terms to terminology used in other contexts.
- Administrator
- Administrator of the system, e.g. OAM in Telco context.
- Consumer
- User-side Manager; consumer of the interfaces produced by the VIM; VNFM,
NFVO, or Orchestrator in ETSI NFV [NFV003] terminology.
- NFV
- Network Function Virtualization
- NFVI
- Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure; totality of all hardware
and software components which build up the environment in which VNFs are
deployed.
- NFVO
- Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator; functional block that
manages the Network Service (NS) lifecycle and coordinates the management
of NS lifecycle, VNF lifecycle (supported by the VNFM) and NFVI resources
(supported by the VIM) to ensure an optimized allocation of the necessary
resources and connectivity.
- Physical resource
- Actual resources in NFVI; not visible to Consumer.
- Resource zone
- A set of NFVI hardware and software resources logically grouped
according to physical isolation and redundancy capabilities or to
certain administrative policies for the NFVI [NFVIFA010]
- VIM
- Virtualized Infrastructure Manager; functional block that is responsible
for controlling and managing the NFVI compute, storage and network
resources, usually within one operator’s Infrastructure Domain, e.g. NFVI
Point of Presence (NFVI-PoP).
- Virtual Machine (VM)
- Virtualized computation environment that behaves very much like a physical
computer/server.
- Virtual network
- Virtual network routes information among the network interfaces of VM
instances and physical network interfaces, providing the necessary
connectivity.
- Virtual resource
- A Virtual Machine (VM), a virtual network, or virtualized storage; Offered
resources to “Consumer” as result of infrastructure virtualization;
visible to Consumer.
- Virtual Storage
- Virtualized non-volatile storage allocated to a VM.
- VNF
- Virtualized Network Function. Implementation of an Network Function that
can be deployed on a Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI).
- VNFM
- Virtualized Network Function Manager; functional block that is responsible
for the lifecycle management of VNF.