Managing the availability of VNFs with the availability management framework

A Virtualized Network Function (VNF) is deployed as a cluster of VMs in the Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI). As in traditional telecom, VNFs are expected to provide the required functions at the requested level of availability. For this, one has to incorporate proper redundancy, and appropriate recovery and coordination mechanisms among the redundant entities. The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) has standardized such mechanisms into a set of middleware services. Among them, the Availability Management Framework (AMF) has the responsibility of managing the availability of application services based on a configuration, called AMF configuration. We propose the use of AMF to manage the availability of the services provided by VNFs. For this, we map the AMF concepts to the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) domain and propose a method for the generation of AMF configurations for AMF managed VNFs. The approach generates an AMF configuration that meets the required level of availability of the requested service workload while aims at maximizing the resource utilization.