The European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) recently put on a plugtest event in Madrid, Spain, where 35 commercial and open source implementations were tested for interoperability, and it saw promising results as released in its report.

For features like network service on-boarding, instantiation, and termination, 98 percent of the interoperability tests succeeded. The standards body also saw positive results for more complex tests like scaling and network service updates.

Specifically, the participants tested interoperability for 15 virtual network functions (VNFs), 9 management and network orchestration (MANO) systems, and 11 network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) and virtual infrastructure manager (VIM) platforms.

More than 160 engineers were involved coming from various vendors and open source projects including ETSI OSM and Open-O, as well as OPNFV and Open Baton.

The vendors that contributed to the MANO systems included ADVA, Cisco, Ericsson, Frauhofer Fokus, HPE, Huawei, Openet, Rift.io, Canonical, and Telefonica.

And those that contributed to the NFVI and VIM platforms included ADVA, Canonical, Lenovo, Intel, Ericsson, Telefonica, Red Hat, VMware, and Wind River.

During the two-week testing phase, test sessions were organized to make sure that all participants had at least one test session scheduled at any time and that a maximum number of combinations could be tested.

Each day, 10 different combinations of MANO and VIM/NFVI were scheduled, with up to 4 VNFs to be tested on each of them during the day. Overall, 160 different combinations of these technologies were tested for interoperability and over 1,500 individual test results were reported.

The test plan was developed by ETSI’s Center for Testing and Interoperability and focused on validating NFV Release 2 capabilities including management of descriptors, software images, lifecycle management of network services, and VNFs.

“These tests were important since it gives the industry a good indication of where NFV is right now. A great move forward has been done in the past, and now we're moving on to tackle very complex features like autoscaling,” said Pierre Lynch, vice chairman of the ETSI NFV Testing, Implementation and Open Source group.