 3 Network Function Virtualization by network and compute for session state management. Providing additional CPU to an I/O bound VNF is not helpful. Characterizing various VNFs and understanding how they scale with different kinds of resources is a key step toward answering the above questions. Research has been proposed to develop tools to determine the virtualization setups and configuration options to optimize VNF performance and automatically scale the VNF resource allocation with workload [51]. One difficulty is that there is a large number of configuration knobs and hardware settings, for example, CPU pinning, c-states, and memory interleaving; they are all available in NFV deployments. We develop efficient search algorithms for this. This type of performance characterization tool can significantly improve the onboarding process, giving more confidence to the net- work operators to support this area. It can help NFV infrastructure providers to better understand, control, and manage the VNFs. Benchmarking the VNF's network and compute performance in real NFV deployment is important for the resource allocation. Figure 3.4 shows a typical VNF performance characterization pro- cess. The testing is performed for each configuration. Different virtualization technologies, such as Intel DPDK, SR-IOV, and VT-d, are configured depending on the scenarios. Tests are done with different VM placement and configurations. VMs may be deployed on the same hosts or across hosts, both have different impact on the real performance. Within each server, different core scheduling Performance Virtualization characterization and templates analysis measurements OSS/BSS NFV management and orchestration Service, VNF, infrastructure description VFN workload Orchestration generator VNF manager VFN throughput and load monitor Virtual Virtual Virtual compute storage network Virtualization layer Virtualized Compute Network infrastructure Storage manager Physical resources Figure 3.4 VNF performance characterization. 3.4 NFV Orchestration al