Creating image from VDU for each VNFC
A VDU is responsible for creating images that contain the required software for the VNFC and the target virtual infrastructure that is being worked with. This may be supplied by the vendor of the VNF. The images associated with the VDU will have to be either deployed to an image repository that the VIM used in the deployment can see, or the images will have to be pushed to the required VIM location.
About this task
Tools such as Packer can be used to create images from the VDU for different target VIMs. These images will contain the base software for the virtual machine to run. VDUs will need built images to be distributed to the various environments. The images can be stored in a repository and when standing up for example a docker container the image will be pulled down from the repository.
The first time an instance of a VDU is requested for a location the image will be pulled from the repository that manages the images. Subsequent instantiations will use the image that already exists. In some environments it is preferable to have pushed the images to the locations prior to their use, for example if they are very large in size.
Very often ready-made images are provided by the VNF vendors for specific target platform and no VDU is available. In this case, you don’t use the VDU folder in the VNFC and simply specify the link to the image in the VNFC descriptor as follows.
Procedure
image:
type: string
description: "the image name for target VIM"
default: image location