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My friend: Hi Ibrahim, I have a question for you.
- Me: Please, go ahead.
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My friend: I have some confusion regarding the difference between NFV and VNF, so could you clarify it?
- Me: Sure. NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is a concept that defines how products and services are built, deployed, and used. In technical terms, NFV is an architecture that decouples HW and SW and allows the functionality of network devices and services to operate on a general purpose HW and be deployed as SW within virtual machines (VMs) or containers. The underlying HW is abstracted and decoupled from the network services, eliminating the dependency on proprietary HW.
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My friend: So, what about VNF?
- Me: VNF (Virtual Network Function) refers to the network service workloads that were running on the traditional HW, but now due to virtualization, are running as independent applications over any COTS HW. VNF can be one VM or multiple VMs based on the functions needed to be done, so for example, 4G MME (Mobility Management Entity) inside the 4G core can be done using multiple VMs as it has many functions, and each function can be executed via one VM.
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My friend: But what are the advantages which NFV and VNF bring?
- Me: NFV gives developers and consumers more flexibility in their choice of HW, which in turn leads to lower cost and easier upgrades and maintenance. It allows consumers to benefit from the scalability and redundancy of virtualization where the underlying HW is treated as an extendable pool of resources. Also, VNFs are no longer limited to the resources within a single device. Rather, they can dynamically scale their capacity up or down to meet the real-time performance needs of the network.
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My friend: Thank you very much, you made it very clear.
- Me: You are most welcome.
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