Telefónica's OpenMANO project now has code available, giving the world access to a slice of the work that's going on in the carrier's network functions virtualization (NFV) Reference Lab.

Interested in learning more about network functions virtualization and NFV Orchestration? Be sure to check out our pages on NFV MANO, SDN Orchestration, OPNFV.

Telefónica had OpenMANO on display at Mobile World Congress in Intel's booth, but the code wasn't available at the time. Now it is, as the carrier announced last week, with these items being added to the OpenMANO Github repository:

• Openmano (spelled without capitals), a reference implementation of an NFV orchestrator
• Openvim, a reference implementation of a virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM)
• A graphical user interface.

What this amounts to is the first open source version of an NFV management and orchestration (MANO) stack, Telefónica claims.

[caption id="attachment_22650" align="aligncenter" width="640"] OpenMANO's place in the ETSI NFV architecture. Source: Telefónica.[/caption]

The announcement was last week, but the code was dropped into Github “a couple of weeks ago,” according to Francisco-Javier Ramón, head of the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab. It's picked up some “good activity” already in terms of downloads, he writes in an email to SDxCentral.

The orchestrator and VIM are pieces of the ETSI NFV framework, the blueprint that carriers would like the industry to follow. (The OPNFV open source group was founded to build a working reference implementation of that framework, starting with lower layers that include the VIM and the NFV infrastructure.)

The VIM's job is to talk to elements such as OpenFlow controllers and NFV compute nodes, relaying instructions based on what the NFV orchestrator wants. The orchestrator sits at a higher level, communicating with upper-layer entities such as OSS/BSS systems.

The goal behind the Telefónica NFV Reference Lab is to set up a vendor-neutral NFV orchestration environment, a place where the carrier can test performance and interoperability of virtual network functions (VNFs). This is the same lab that got the Brocade virtual router to run at 80 Gb/s last year.

With OpenMANO, the lab is making available some code that Telefónica itself has been using. The carrier is hoping that sharing the code — which many vendors are already familiar with — can encourage NFV's progress.