Chinese telecommunications and network equipment maker ZTE Corp. has established a test bed based on OPNFV’s first code release, Arno.

It's the tenth such virtual lab hosted by OPNFV member companies in North America, Europe and Asia.  Orange, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, China Mobile, Spirent, and Dell are also hosting labs as part of OPNFV's Pharos Project, the code name for its test beds.

At its test bed in Nan-Jing, China, ZTE has already completed network interconnection tests with partners including ARM, whose processor architecture is used by many chip vendors; Centec Networks and Accton, both involved with switching; and Hillstone, which develops virtual firewalls.

OPNFV aims to build a network functions virtualization (NFV) reference platform using elements from other open source projects. The test beds provide a consistent view of infrastructures and their capabilities, according to an OPNFV blog.

ZTE’s test bed is a project of its SDN/NFV Joint Open Lab, which consists of a hybrid cloud platform accommodating both the IT multitenant public cloud and carrier-class private cloud. ZTE is testing such things as:

• Verifying infrastructure compliance when running virtual network functions (VNFs)
• Parsing telecom operators’ descriptors/records into certain common templates, which could be used in infrastructure-as-a-system (IaaS) orchestration projects like OpenStack Heat
• Developing test suites that cover detailed functional test cases, test methodologies, and platform configurations, which will be documented and maintained in a repository for use by other OPNFV testing projects and the community in general.

Besides its work with OPNFV, ZTE participated in an Open Networking Foundation (ONF) member workday earlier this month. At that event, five types of SDN switches produced by Chinese vendors Huawei, ZTE, H3C, and DCN became the first batch of equipment to pass the OpenFlow v1.3 conformance test.