NTT DOCOMO’s Tacker Activity

Figure 1: real number of DOCOMO business

1. Tacker ecosystem with Operator

OpenStack is one of key component to realize NFV. OpenStack supports to manage a lot of compute nodes and network of resource pools which provide virtual resource for Virtualized NFs(VNFs). DOCOMO also uses OpenStack to virtualize NFs for economic, high performance and reliable infrastructure. In initial phase, DOCOMO uses 4 Specific VNFMs for each VNF vendors on OpenStack infrastructure.

Tacker is Generic VNFM specified in ETSI NFV to manage multi-vendor VNFs on multi-clouds. DOCOMO uses Tacker in commercial and is migrating from Specific VNFMs to Tacker as Generic VNFM, because it is difficult to maintain all Specific VNFMs when platform is upgraded, and it is complicated to introduce new type of infrastructure such as Container infrastructure. Therefore, DOCOMO decided to use Generic VNFM to manage all type of VNFs on multiple infrastructures.

Figure 2: Generic VNFM

In order to manage multi-vendor VNFs for multi-domain on multi-clouds, unified specification is important for DOCOMO. OpenStack Tacker is key bridge among operator development, standards and open sources as figure 3. Tacker has proven that it can be operated as a generic VNFM that is compliant with the ETSI NFV Standard, resolving various lessons.

Figure 3: unified ecosystem

2. Commercialize Tacker

Tacker is one of major components in OpenStack, and many bugs have been already resolved in long history and revision. Now the Tacker is mature for large scale commercial level from quality, performance and reliability perspective. Although integration in operator environment is required, such as redundancy of DB, monitor Tacker itself and user management, Tacker is simple and light product of VNFM. There are several deployment options, container based, VM based and standalone depending on operator’s environment.

Operator can easily integrate with VNF by creating SOL001 based VNF Package, script for mgmt-driver, and virtual resource descriptor (HOT or Helm). Since Tacker can support Instantiate VNF, Terminate VNF, Scale VNF, Heal VNF, Upgrade VNF and error-handling, Tacker meets commercial use cases for any type of VNF through the fulfillment of key lifecycles defined by ETSI NFV.

By these accumulated quality improvements, flexible environment adaptation, and integration with VNFs, Tacker has become a product suitable for commercial level as Generic VNFM. DOCOMO and Tacker will lead platform of telco cloud among development, standard and open source.

Tags: ETSI, NFV, OpenStack, Tacker, VNF