5 Best NFV Tools 2024: Optimize Network Infrastructure

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology that enables organizations to optimize their network infrastructure and enhance operational efficiency. This technology abstracts network functions, like routing, firewalling, and load balancing, from proprietary hardware components and implements them as software-based virtualized instances. This transformative approach offers many benefits, including cost reduction, scalability, agility, and flexibility. However, to effectively leverage NFV, organizations need robust tools that can deploy and manage these virtualized network functions.

Here is our list of the best network function virtualization (NFV) tools:

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager A comprehensive manager that maps dependencies among virtual objects and provides the insights you need to improve efficiency and resource utilization.
VMware NSX An advanced virtualization platform that simplifies the deployment of virtual resources across multiple cloud environments while providing visibility through a unified console.
Contrail Networking A well-designed virtualization tool from Juniper that provides advanced analytics for scalability and efficient resource allocation.
Mavenir CloudRange A fully automated NFV solution that's built with a cloud-native and web-scale architecture to bring down the total cost of ownership.
Ribbon VNF Manager This generic platform supports the full lifecycle management of all VNFs, including third-party and Ribbon VNFs.

Read on for a more detailed look into each platform's capabilities.

Importance of NFV Tools for Organizations

NFV tools come with a comprehensive set of features to simplify and automate the complex processes involved in managing virtualized network functions. By leveraging NFV tools, organizations can:

Simplify Deployment With NFV tools, you can quickly deploy virtualized network functions and eliminate the manual installation and configuration of dedicated hardware appliances. This simplification enhances agility and accelerates service delivery.
Improve Scalability You can dynamically scale network functions based on demand. With this capability, NFV ensures optimal resource utilization and efficient handling of traffic surges. This inherent scalability feature makes it easy to seamlessly adapt to changing network conditions.
Enhance Flexibility With NFV tools, you can easily introduce new network functions or modify existing ones without the need for physical infrastructure changes. This flexibility enables you to quickly respond to business needs and make use of opportunities as they emerge.
Reduce Costs When you move away from hardware components, your capital and maintenance costs reduce. The virtualized nature of NFV also improves resource utilization and reduces the need for extensive hardware.

Now that you know the benefits of NFV tools for your organization, it's time to select one for your organization. But, this is not easy because of the many options available today.

The Best Network Function Virtualization Tools

Factors to Consider While Choosing an NFV Platform

Given the many NFV platforms available today, you should carefully evaluate if the chosen tool aligns with your business needs. Here are some factors to consider while making this decision.

Functionality A robust NFV platform should support a wide range of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) or must integrate with third-party VNFs. This is important for the NFV to support many essential network functions like routing.
Performance and Scalability Consider the platform's performance, including throughput, latency, and packet processing capabilities. Check to see if these capabilities are enough to handle your increasing network traffic.
Orchestration and Management While selecting an NFV platform, look for features like centralized management, automated provisioning, dynamic scaling, etc. that will provide the control and visibility you need to better manage your environment.
Interoperability and Integration Evaluate the platform's compatibility with existing network infrastructure, network management systems, and cloud environments to ensure that It seamlessly integrates with your organization's ecosystem.
Security and Reliability The NFV platform you choose must have robust security features to protect virtualized network functions and the data they encapsulate. Additionally, consider factors like the platform's reliability, fault tolerance, and high availability to ensure uninterrupted service delivery.
Vendor Support and Ecosystem Lastly, evaluate the vendor's reputation, support capabilities, and commitment to ongoing development and maintenance of the NFV platform. An active and engaged vendor community fosters innovation and provides access to a wider ecosystem of compatible tools and solutions.

With these factors in mind, let's jump to some top NFV platforms available today.

1. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a comprehensive platform for monitoring and managing virtual resources through a single interface. It is designed to provide complete control and visibility into the health and performance of your virtual instances, so you can troubleshoot problems and improve their efficiency.

Let's now look at a few key features of using this tool.

Key Features:

Provides Insights into the Most Important Monitoring Metrics: A key benefit of using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is the key insights it offers into the metrics that matter the most to you. It combines metrics from different sources and runs them through the proprietary PerfStack to provide details of metrics like network usage rates, CPU and memory utilization, and more to better understand the current performance. You can also use this information to improve resource utilization and capacity planning.
Maps Dependencies Among Virtual Objects: Interdependencies among objects are one of the pain points of troubleshooting. To help you navigate through this maze, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager maps the dependencies between virtual objects, so you can see the contextual relationships between the different objects in your server. With this understanding, you can also better understand the behavior of clusters of virtual machines, application groups, hosts, storage, and more.
Optimizes Your Virtual Environment: SolarWinds Virtualization Manager analyzes the current state of your environment to identify the usage of different resources like CPU and memory. In particular, it examines if resources are under-utilized or overutilized, and accordingly, provides actionable recommendations to optimize your environment. Similarly, it also provides information on your storage capacity and utilization, to reduce virtualization sprawl and reclaim any unused memory.

All the above features can undoubtedly help you make the most of your virtual environment while improving the efficiency of your operations.

Pricing starts at $1,917. Contact the sales team for a custom quote. Watch an interactive demo, or even better, start a free trial.

2. VMware NSX

VMware NSX by Broadcom is another popular virtual networking and cloud security platform that helps to manage virtualized network deployments. It uses various VNFs to simulate the role of firewalls, switches, routers, and other hardware components, and in the process enables vendor-agnostic hypervisors to communicate with each other.

Below are some key advantages of using VMware NSX.

Key Features:

Highly Automated Overlay Services A standout feature of VMware NSX is its ability to quickly create new services across the L2 to L7 network layer. Its highly scalable and automated tool also handles networking, security, and load balancing across all workloads. Additionally, it's easy to segment or microsegment your network with NSX.
Highly Secure VMware NSX adds another layer of security to your virtual resources. It protects against malicious threats and ransomware attacks using a wide range of technologies like sandboxing, Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems, NTA, and more. All these technologies come together to prevent false positives and enhance the speed of resolution.
Unified Console The unified console of VMware NSX makes it easy to plan, deploy, and manage all resources through a single interface. The NSX console is built directly into vCenter, and this means, no changes or additional installations are required. More importantly, you can manage multiple environments, and deploy consistent security policies among them for improved synchronization.

In all, VMware NSX helps to build a smart cloud network with consistent policies and automation across multiple environments.

NSX comes in three editions, Professional, Advanced, and Enterprise Plus. Talk to an expert to better understand which edition is best for your organization. See how the product works hands-on.

3. Contrail Networking

Contrail Networking from Juniper is an open and agile cloud network automation that is based on a scalable microservice's architecture. Often, Contrail is used to accelerate the deployment of new services and to gain more out of existing resources through virtualization.

Here's a look at a few ways by which Contrail can add value to your organization.

Key Features:

Advanced Analytics A highlight of Contrail is its always-on advanced analytics capabilities that provide continuous insights into application and infrastructure performance. Using this information, your organization can gain better visualization into the health and performance of different virtual functions, get easier diagnostics information and context for troubleshooting, and generate rich reports for auditing and compliance. Furthermore, it integrates with other analytics platforms like AppFormix and Kafka to provide seamless views.
Highly Scalable Contrail's microservices architecture makes it easy to scale as needed, even for the most demanding NFV use cases. Also, it leverages open networking standards and APIs to integrate with orchestration systems through a plug-in approach. All these aspects ensure that Contrail meets your growing business needs while delivering predictability and low-cost of ownership.
Automated Provisioning and Orchestration Another advantage of Contrail is its automated network provisioning and orchestration that enables you to dynamically create virtual networks. More importantly, you chain multiple virtual networks to Juniper's or other third party's VNFs, and even physical network functions to create an integrated stack.

In all, the combination of these advantages makes Contrail a good choice for organizations that prioritize scalability and low-cost of ownership.

Get a custom quote based on your organization's needs.

4. Mavenir CloudRange

Mavenir CloudRange is an end-to-end NFV platform that supports large-scale deployment of cloud-native VNFs for Tier 1 mobile operators and Communications Service Providers (CSPs). It supports the deployment of many advanced VNFs like vSBC, vIMS, and vEPC for consumer and enterprise segments.

Key Features:

Technology Agnostic The rapid advancements in technology make it increasingly difficult to choose an NFV that is future-proof. In this sense, CloudRange can be a game changer for organizations because it supports 2G to 5G platforms. Similarly, CloudRange is a next-generation cloud-native platform that supports Kubernetes-based Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Telecom PaaS layers.
Highly Cost Effective CloudRange is designed to be a cost-effective solution for cloud operations. It makes it easy for you to quickly deploy and scale up operations, so you can leverage opportunities as they come up. At the same time, its advanced automation capabilities reduce the number of resources you need and help you save on OPEX and CAPEX costs.
Secure and Adaptable Another advantage of CloudRange is that it is highly adaptable and secure. It uses a zero-trust approach, which means, the chances for unauthorized access are greatly reduced. At the same time, it is light and scalable and hence is highly adaptable to evolving situations.

When all these features are well-used, mobile operators can gain a significant advantage.

For pricing contact the customer support team to know more.

5. Ribbon VNF Manager

Ribbon VNF Manager simplifies the deployment of VNFs across your entire network infrastructure. Specifically, it handles the onboarding and cataloging of your VNFs and monitors their health and performance in real-time.

Below are some ways by which Ribbon VNF Manager can add value to your organization.

Key Features:

Intuitive Interface A highlight of Ribbon VNF Manager is its intuitive and easy-to-use graphical user interface. Besides easy navigation across different views, you can also use its pre-built Wizard functionality to increase or decrease the amount of information that's displayed to you. In this sense, it's highly customizable to suit the needs of different employees.
Built-in Redundancy The Ribbon VNF Manager comes with built-in redundancy and resilience in its architecture to empower you to continuously operate even in complex cloud environments. Moreover, the VNF manager also acts as another VNF that can be deployed in any OpenStack environment.
Manages the Entire Lifecycle of VNFs Ribbon VNF Manager manages the entire lifecycle of VNFs, including their deployment and management to bring down the cost and effort needed with handling VNFs. Besides, it also supports advanced features like healing, scaling, migrating, upgrading, and more.

Overall, the Ribbon VNF Manager boosts the efficiency of your operations and reduces the resources needed for managing your VNFs.

Contact the sales team for further details on pricing.

Thus, these are some prominent NFV tools that can help you leverage network virtualization without worrying about their complexity and management.

Final Thoughts

To recap, NFV tools help organizations to optimize their network infrastructure and achieve operational efficiency. These tools simplify deployment, improve scalability, enhance flexibility, and reduce costs. Additionally, they enable organizations to adapt quickly to changing business needs. The top NFV tools discussed in this article—SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, VMware NSX, Contrail Networking, Mavenir CloudRange, and Ribbon VNF Manager—offer unique features to meet diverse organizational requirements. By selecting the right NFV tools, you can build a resilient and efficient network infrastructure that supports your growth.