Coupling VNF Orchestration and SDN Virtual Network Reconfiguration

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) promises an efficient way of managing and orchestrating Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), where VNFs can be dynamically instantiated or migrated based on current service requirements. For instance, in order to improve the performance of mission critical services, VNFs can be instantiated closer to users or even be migrated over time to follow mobile users. However, this orchestration leads to changes, e.g, of the traffic requirements of the data and control plane of virtual network interconnecting VNFs. Particularly in virtualized Software-Defined Networking (vSDN) environments, these traffic changes require fast adaptations of the data and control plane isolation and abstraction policies, which guarantee predictable network operation and control. More in detail, the entity managing the virtualization (i.e., the SDN hypervisor) has to quickly reconfigure the policies of affected Virtual Networks (VNs) interconnecting VNFs. In this demo, we present i) the benefits of migrating a firewall VNF to a server, which is closer to its user, at runtime and show ii) how the migration is supported in a virtualized SDN environment.