More Testing than Tapas: ETSI Releases Detailed Plugtest Report

A few weeks ago, we published a post “Tapas and Testing: Two Weeks in Madrid” summarizing Wind River’s involvement in ETSI’s first “NFV Plugtest” event, which was hosted by 5TONIC Laboratory in Leganes, near Madrid  from January 23^rd through February 3^rd. In that post, we summarized the success of the Wind River Titanium Cloud network virtualization platform in demonstrating full interoperability with nine MANO solutions and fifteen VNFs, some of which were open-source projects while others were commercial offerings.

As promised, ETSI has now published their report on the plugfest. Reviewing this 44-page document, it’s clear that the teams actually spent way more time on performing interoperability tests than in consuming tapas, because the results are extremely comprehensive and detailed.

This report is a great read for anyone interested in understanding the complexity of evaluating multi-vendor interoperability for end-to-end NFV solutions. Starting with a description of the technical and project management approach to the plugtest, it then summarizes the various functions that were tested, comprising VNFs, MANO solutions, VIMs and NFVI platforms. It provides a wealth of detail on the test infrastructure, the test procedures and the test plans themselves.

For many readers, the bottom line will be the comprehensive interoperability results presented in the report as well as the summary of the overall plugtest outcome.

All in all, this report is definitely recommended reading for anyone involved in NFV.

Plugtests like this one hosted by ETSI are vital as the telecom industry transitions from traditional, fixed-function equipment to dis-aggregated virtualized solutions that leverage best-in-class products from multiple vendors. Events like this demonstrate that an industry-wide ecosystem can successfully form around open standards and deliver interoperable, compatible products. And of course, there was occasionally some downtime for sampling the excellent tapas in Madrid.

Wind River was proud to contribute to this inaugural ETSI Plugtest and we look forward to even more exciting and advanced accomplishments at the next one.