NETWORK FUNCTION VIRTUALIZATION AS A PART OF MODULAR VIRTUALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE IN LAB ENVIRONMENT

Universities research environment often need flexible IT infrastructure for network services research as well as isolated lab working environments for students. Different research environment groups and applications have to be moved in cloud to be able to allocate resource on demand, e.g. number of CPU cores. Also, a system that supports flexible and automated environment is needed, which can be installed / reinstalled in couple of minutes supporting computing nodes and upgraded as research activities grows with no service discontinuity. As Lab virtualized infrastructure, OpenStack as common open source platform is used, built on UNIX based operating system and Intel based hardware. This paper analyses known industry approaches and virtualization techniques resulting with design of the lab virtualized infrastructure that are going to enable flexible research working environment. Network function virtualization as key part of such modular environment should improve performance and security, as well as change physical network components. The usage of Virtual Machines (VM) or containers are key elements inside Lab infrastructure in order to provide an abstraction between hardware resources and applications Before LAB design creation as the final result, basics items and steps have to be adopted and defined, such as standardisation of students/research groups that can interact with the system, self-managing and orchestration. Common building blocks are used as parts of design such as hardware based on x86 industry, hypervisors, UNIX based operating system, databases, high performance data model. The main goal is design of a lab environment, which enable flexible, secure, high available and self-growing platform where different research groups and students can develop and test their systems and get reliable results.