Chapter 1. Overview

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a software solution that virtualizes a network function on general purpose, cloud-based infrastructure. NFV allows the Communication Service Provider to move away from traditional hardware.

For a high-level overview of the NFV concepts, see the Network Functions Virtualization Product Guide.

You can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform director to separate specific overcloud network types, for example, external, tenant, and internal API networks, into isolated networks. You can deploy a network on a single network interface or distributed over a multiple host network interface. Create bonds by assigning multiple interfaces to a single bridge with Open vSwitch. Use template configuration files to configure network isolation. Without template configuration files, all the service networks in your Red Hat OpenStack Platform installation are deployed on the provisioning network. There are multiple types of template configuration files:

These Heat template files are located at /usr/share/openstack-tripleo-heat-templates/ on the undercloud node.

The following sections provide more details on how to plan and configure the Heat template files for NFV using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director.