23 January 2026, Yuya Kuno, NFV SOL Vice-Chair
With respect to the Stage 2 outcomes of this release drop, the related documentation has been enhanced, focusing on FEAT33 “Physical Infrastructure Management (PIM)” to support multi-tenancy and additional metrics. Related updates are in ETSI GS NFV-IFA010, ETSI GS NFV-IFA027 and ETSI GS NFV-IFA053. Additional enhancements are related to FEAT29 “Green NFV”, where power profiles have been introduced in the framework, through updates in ETSI GS NFV-IFA007, ETSI GS NFV-IFA010 and ETSI GS NFV-IFA011.
In more detail, for stage 3 work, major outcomes were the completion of the ETSI GS NFV-SOL 022 “Protocols and Data Models; Policy descriptor”, ETSI GS NFV‑SOL 023 “Protocols and Data Models; Specification of protocol and data model solutions for CMF – NFV-MANO reference point” and ETSI GS NFV-SOL 024 “Protocols and Data Models; Specification of protocol and data model solutions for VNF Generic OAM functions and PaaS Services”. As usual, stage 3 specifications were kept aligned to the respective stage 2 documents in the features of FEAT29 “Green NFV”.
- ETSI GS NFV-SOL 022 represents the completion of the standardisation work on policy management as part of the FEAT26 “Policy-models” and is the final piece of the policy framework in NFV. This was a continuation of the specification work initiated by the stage 2 specification completion of ETSI GS NFV-IFA 048. The policy descriptor enables NFV-MANO to support granular management and operation by state, task and context concept.
- ETSI GS NFV-SOL 023 is an interface to enable NFV-MANO to support an automatic certificate delivery framework. This release supports direct mode and delegation mode to deliver a certificate to the VNF. This was a continuation of the specification work initiated by the stage 2 specification completion of ETSI GS NFV-IFA 026 and ETSI GS NFV-IFA 033.
- ETSI GS NFV-SOL 024 is an extension of the NFV-MANO framework to support generic OAM functionalities for cloud native VNFs based on industrial solutions, such as Isitio, Prometheus Alertmanager, Fluent Bit, OpenSearch, VictoriaMetrics.
The next drop ed541 in Release 5 will focus on maintenance to further improve the current architecture. Note that Release 5 is the last Release using the NFV-MANO architecture. The next Release 6 is a major overhaul of the NFV architectural framework towards the Telco Cloud.
