By Chris Donley, Sr Director, Open Source Ecosystems, Huawei; Chair, OPNFV Certification & Compliance Committee
As we kick off 2018, the OPNFV Compliance & Certification committee—the members driven body within OPNFV that defines recommendations to the Board for policies and oversight for compliance and certification—is pleased to announce the launch of the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP). The program is designed to simplify adoption of NFV in commercial products by establishing an industry threshold based on OPNFV releases. The fact we are using an open source platform as referent to measure compliance of commercial products—not necessarily based on its source code—is a new and innovative step for the industry.
The OPNFV Verified Program facilitates both vendor self-testing and third-party lab testing using the Dovetail test suite. In our initial version, we will be testing NFV infrastructure components: NFVI and VIM. In the future, we may expand the program to cover VNFs and other components, as well. In December, just ahead of the launch, we conducted a “beta program” with several vendors: Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, and ZTE. These companies provided valuable feedback while we refined and finalized the program. They also represent the first cohort to received the privilege of using the OPNFV Verified mark and logo. Congratulations to these companies and we welcome additional members of the open NFV ecosystem to join us!
OPNFV Verified Program is designed to help operators establish entry criteria for their trials and RFPs. We have worked closely with end user advisor operators to establish a framework and an initial bar to support their requirements. The program will also reduce operator testing load by identifying a set of common tests and executing them just once under the auspices of the OPNFV Verified Program, rather than many times in many labs. As OPNFV and the industry at large continue to mature, we will steadily raise the bar in future versions as to what becomes verified. We expect two OPNFV Verified versions per year, denoted with the month and the year to make it easy to identify the compliance level of submitted products.
Under the auspices of The Linux Foundation, we are well positioned to expand the program to support other projects in the future. Prior to the official launch, we initiated discussions with related projects on leveraging the program to support the wider open source community. OPNFV’s C&C, the group responsible for chartering the OPNFV Verified Program, is also exploring additional operator use cases that can be incorporated into the compliance test suite.
I am excited about the launch of the OPNFV Verified Program and I hope you will join us in 2018! To operators, I invite you to share your use cases and functional requirements, and please consider incorporating OPNFV Verified into your RFP process or lab trials. To vendors, I hope you’ll download the Dovetail tool and test your commercial offerings. If you’re looking for assistance, several third-party labs are eager to help. Learn more about the OPNFV Verified Program and get started today!
Please direct any questions you may have to verified@opnfv.org.