(http://www.etsi.org/news-events/news/1284-2018-03-news-etsi-and-opnfv-announce-co-located-testing-and-interoperability-events?tmpl=component&print=1&layout=default&page=)

The Third ETSI NFV Plugtests Event and OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will take place at ETSI from 29 May to 8 June

ETSI and OPNFV will co-locate their next community testing events in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Sophia Antipolis, France, 21 March 2018: The third ETSI NFV Plugtests^TM event will be held between 29 May and 8 June 2018, and the OPNFV Fraser Plugfest will be held from 4 to 8 June. ETSI and OPNFV look forward to increasing collaboration across the standards and open source ecosystem by co-locating their testing activities. OPNFV is an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing.

“ Effective interoperability is the goal of any standards activity, and ETSI NFV adopted an approach oriented towards actually exercising and demonstrating interoperability from its start in 2012, evolving from Proofs of Concepts to Plugtests activities” says Diego Lopez, chairman of ETSI ISG NFV. “This event is a new opportunity to strengthen the current cooperation with relevant open-source communities in the NFV landscape. ”

The third NFV Plugtests event will concentrate on building and demonstrating complex Network Services that combine virtual network functions from different VNF providers and developers, while testing interoperability with MANO solutions across different platforms and sites. It will also exercise advanced NFV features like network and service automation. The sessions will demonstrate how multivendor combinations of NFV components can address 5G, edge computing and zero-touch network and service management use cases, and will expand the scope of NFV API testing to help progress the work on NFV conformance testing.

OPNFV plugfests focus on interoperability of the OPNFV platform in deployment, network integration, VNF applications, and more. The event provides a platform for the community to work with hardware from both open source and commercial vendors and try out various combinations of components. During the last OPNFV plugfest, December 4-8, 2017, the focus was on the OPNFV Euphrates release and included discussion on contributing specific test cases for the combined ETSI/OPNFV plugfest in June. Read the full Plugfest Report. The focus of the next plugfest will be on the Fraser release as well as developer design sessions for topics related to testing, CI/CD, and future releases. Participation is open to any interested developers.

“We are pleased to be co-locating our next OPNFV plugfest with ETSI” said Heather Kirksey, VP, community and ecosystem development, The Linux Foundation. “Acceleration of NFV interoperability is a shared goal among both organizations and overlapping communities; co-locating the events will facilitate greater collaboration of resources and more consistency within deployments.”

Open source communities such as ETSI Open Source MANO, Open Baton, OpenStack and OPNFV are actively involved in the ETSI Plugtests’ activities through their membership and implementations. Collaboration among standards organizations, open source communities, and testing events enable better cross-project communication and harmonization.

The two-week ETSI event is part of the ongoing ETSI NFV Plugtests Programme. The programme takes advantage of the ETSI Hub for Interoperability and Validation (HIVE) to inter-connect worldwide participating organizations (more than 45 currently), engaging in different validation tests. It provides the foundation for the direct interaction among function developers with interoperability as the essential goal.

About ETSI

ETSI provides members with an open, inclusive and collaborative environment to support the timely development, ratification and testing of globally applicable standards for ICT-enabled systems, applications and services across all sectors of industry and society. We are a not-for-profit organization with more than 800 member organizations worldwide, drawn from 66 countries and five continents. Members comprise a diversified pool of large and small private companies, research entities, academia, government and public organizations. ETSI is one of only three bodies officially recognized by the EU as a European Standards Organization (ESO).