VNF Manager User Guide¶

Tacker VNF Manager (VNFM) component manages the life-cycle of a Virtual Network Function (VNF). VNFM takes care of deployment, monitoring, scaling and removal of VNFs on a Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM).

Onboarding VNF¶

TOSCA VNFD templates can be onboarded to Tacker VNFD Catalog using following command:

openstack vnf descriptor create --vnfd-file <yaml file path> <VNFD-NAME>

Note

Users can find various sample TOSCA templates at https://github.com/openstack/tacker/tree/master/samples/tosca-templates/vnfd

Deploying VNF¶

There are two ways to create a VNF in Tacker.

Using Tacker Catalog
Direct VNF Instantiation

Using Tacker Catalog¶

In this method, a TOSCA VNFD template is first onboarded into Tacker VNFD catalog. This VNFD is then used to create VNF. This is most common way of creating VNFs in Tacker.

i). Onboard a TOSCA VNFD template.

openstack vnf descriptor create --vnfd-file <yaml file path> <VNFD-NAME>

ii). Create a VNF.

openstack vnf create --vnfd-name <VNFD-FILE-NAME> <VNF-NAME>

Example¶

openstack vnf descriptor create --vnfd-file sample-vnfd-hello-world.yaml hello-world-vnfd
openstack vnf create --vnfd-name hello-world-vnfd hw-vnf

Direct VNF Instantiation¶

In this method, VNF is created directly from the TOSCA template without onboarding the template into Tacker VNFD Catalog.

openstack vnf create --vnfd-template <VNFD-FILE-NAME> <VNF-NAME>

This method is recommended when NFV Catalog is maintained outside Tacker and Tacker is primarily used as a NFV workflow engine.

Example¶

openstack vnf create --vnfd-template sample-vnfd-hello-world.yaml hw-vnf

Note

vnfd-list command will show only the onboarded VNFDs. To list the VNFDs created internally for direct VNF instantiation, use ‘–template-source inline’ flag. To list both onboarded and inline VNFDs, use ‘–template-source all’ flag. The default flag for vnfd-list command is ‘–template-source onboarded’.

openstack vnf descriptor list --template-source inline
openstack vnf descriptor list --template-source all

Finding VNFM Status¶

Status of various VNFM resources can be checked by following commands.

openstack vim list
openstack vnf descriptor list
openstack vnf list
openstack vnf show <VNF_ID>
openstack vnf descriptor show <VNFD_ID>

Deleting VNF and VNFD¶

VNFs and VNFDs can be deleted as shown below.

openstack vnf delete <VNF_ID/NAME>
openstack vnf descriptor delete <VNFD_ID/NAME>