ESC

Elastic Services Controller (ESC) is a Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM), performing lifecycle management of Virtual Network Functions.

ETSI

European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent standardization organization that has been instrumental in developing standards for information and communications technologies (ICT) within Europe.

ETSI Deployment Flavour

A deployment flavour definition contains information about affinity relationships, scaling, min/max VDU instances, and other policies and constraints to be applied to the VNF instance. The deployment flavour defined in the VNF Descriptor (VNFD) must be selected by passing the flavour_id attribute in the InstantiateVNFRequest payload during the instantiate VNF LCM operation.

HA

ESC High Availability (HA) is a solution for preventing single points of ESC failure and achieving minimum ESC downtime.

KPI

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) measures performance management. KPIs specify what, how and when parameters are measured. KPI incorporates information about source, definitions, measures, calculations for specific parameters.

MSX

Cisco Managed Services Accelerator (MSX) is a service creation and delivery platform that enables fast deployment of cloud-based networking services for both Enterprises and Service Providers customers.

NFV

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is the principle of separating network functions from the hardware they run on by using virtual hardware abstraction.

NFVO

NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) is a 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.

NSO

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) is an orchestrator for service activation which supports pure physical networks, hybrid networks (physical and virtual) and NFV use cases.

OpenStack Compute Flavor

Flavors define the compute, memory, and storage capacity of nova computing instances. A flavor is an available hardware configuration for a server. It defines the size of a virtual server that can be launched.

Service

A service consists of a single or multiple VNFs.

The Virtualisation Deployment Unit (VDU) is a construct that can be used in an information model, supporting the description of the deployment and operational behaviour of a subset of a VNF, or the entire VNF if it was not componentized in subsets.

VIM

The Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) adds a management layer for the data center hardware. Its northbound APIs are consumed by other layers to manage the physical and virtual resources for instantiation, termination, scale in and out procedures, and fault & performance alarms.

VM

A Virtual Machine (VM) is an operating system OS or an application installed on a software, which imitates a dedicated hardware. The end user has the same experience on a virtual machine as they would have on dedicated hardware.

VNF

A Virtual Network Function (VNF) consists of a single or a group of VMs with different software and processes that can be deployed on a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure.

VNFM

Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM) manages the life cycle of a VNF.