What is Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)? | VMware Glossary

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), a consortium of service providers including AT&T, China Mobile, BT Group, Deutsche Telekom and many others, first presented the idea of a network functions virtualization standard at the OpenFlow World Congress in 2012. These service providers had been looking for a way to accelerate the deployment of network services.

Launching new network services used to be a cumbersome process that required space and power for additional hardware boxes. As energy and space costs increased and the number of skilled networking hardware engineers decreased, the ETSI committee turned to network functions virtualization to solve both of these problems. NFV eliminates the need for physical space for hardware appliances, and does not require intensive networking experience to configure and manage.

Today, several open source projects are working on developing NFV standards, including ETSI, Open Platform for NFV, Open Network Automation Platform, Open Source MANO and MEF—formerly the Metro Ethernet Forum. So many different organizations with competing proposals for standards have made it challenging for service providers to get comfortable with network functions virtualization. Still, it is growing in popularity because of the quickly expanding complexity and requirements of enterprise networks today.