1. Definition of terms

Different SDOs and communities use different terminology related to NFV/Cloud/SDN. This list tries to define an OPNFV terminology, mapping/translating the OPNFV terms to terminology used in other contexts.

Administrator

Administrator of the system, e.g. OAM in Telco context.

Consumer

User-side Manager; consumer of the interfaces produced by the VIM; VNFM, NFVO, or Orchestrator in ETSI NFV [NFV003] terminology.

NFV

Network Function Virtualization

NFVI

Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure; totality of all hardware and software components which build up the environment in which VNFs are deployed.

NFVO

Network Functions Virtualization Orchestrator; 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.

Physical resource

Actual resources in NFVI; not visible to Consumer.

Resource zone

A set of NFVI hardware and software resources logically grouped according to physical isolation and redundancy capabilities or to certain administrative policies for the NFVI [NFVIFA010]

VIM

Virtualized Infrastructure Manager; functional block that is responsible for controlling and managing the NFVI compute, storage and network resources, usually within one operator’s Infrastructure Domain, e.g. NFVI Point of Presence (NFVI-PoP).

Virtual Machine (VM)

Virtualized computation environment that behaves very much like a physical computer/server.

Virtual network

Virtual network routes information among the network interfaces of VM instances and physical network interfaces, providing the necessary connectivity.

Virtual resource

A Virtual Machine (VM), a virtual network, or virtualized storage; Offered resources to “Consumer” as result of infrastructure virtualization; visible to Consumer.

Virtual Storage

Virtualized non-volatile storage allocated to a VM.

VNF

Virtualized Network Function. Implementation of an Network Function that can be deployed on a Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI).

VNFM

Virtualized Network Function Manager; functional block that is responsible for the lifecycle management of VNF.