Following intense technical work, ETSI NFV has just released ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016, the first stage 3 specification of NFV-MANO procedures in NFV Release 2 addressing interactions across several NFV-MANO functional blocks and/or interfaces. This specification builds on the ETSI NFV-MANO API specifications ETSI GS NFV-SOL 005, ETSI GS NFV-SOL 003 and ETSI GS NFV-SOL 002 which have defined the mandatory and optional operations and data attributes per individual NFV-MANO interface. As these specifications are focusing on individual interfaces, it is left up to the operator or the integrator to stitch together the information across different NFV-MANO interfaces to realize the NFV-MANO procedures involving interactions across several NFV-MANO functional blocks and/or interfaces, also referred to as end-to-end procedures. This might lead to various interpretations of how the end-to-end NFV-MANO procedures should work. ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016 defines procedures for selected key NFV-MANO procedures with the target to improve interoperability end-to-end.

The first released version of ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016 addresses five selected key NFV-MANO procedures, namely on-boarding of a VNF package, instantiation of a network service, termination of a network service instance, scaling of VNF instances in a network service instance and changing the external connectivity of VNF instances in a network service instance.

ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016 enables users to understand the complete information flow and the key information to be sent across the interfaces to realize an NFV-MANO procedure. The NFV-MANO procedures specify in detail the order of the procedural steps, the required input data to operations , the mapping of key attributes across different interfaces, and key information that needs to be exchanged between the different NFV-MANO entities in the selected scenarios. The procedures comply with the functional requirements specified in ETSI GS NFV-IFA 010 and related interface specifications. ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016 also represents a key specification to enable improvements in conformance and/or interoperability tests of various NFV-MANO components. From the procedures specified in this document, it is expected that the ETSI NFV-TST working group could also derive recommendations for end-to-end test requirements.

In ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016, the procedural steps are documented by providing references to the applicable provisions of the NFV-MANO APIs defined in ETSI GS NFV-SOL 005, ETSI GS NFV-SOL 003 and ETSI GS NFV-SOL 002 as well as the related information from NFV descriptors specified in ETSI GS NFV-SOL 001 and ETSI GS NFV-SOL 006. The approach of referencing (instead of copying the relevant information) has been taken to avoid inconsistencies between ETSI GS NFV-SOL 016 and the underlying NFV-MANO API and descriptor specifications, and to decrease maintenance overheads across multiple specifications in the future. Additional procedures that can have dependencies on the "main" procedure of a specific scenario, or that can be executed at any time in parallel to such procedure, are documented in specific "Dependent procedures" and " Non-dependent procedures" clauses in the document.

Special thanks go out to all companies that supported in the completion of this work in Release-2. This is the first step of taking an end-to-end view, allowing to provide consistent cross-API information for the integration of different NFV-MANO components from different providers in an overall NFV deployment. As a starting point, this first published version covers a basic set of selected scenarios. Improvements in the outline of the procedures, modularization to optimise the reuse of repeating sub-flows across different scenarios and adding end-to-end procedures for more scenarios are on the to-do list for further work that could be done in future versions of this document.