Virtualized Infrastructure Manager

Description

The Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) is a core functional block within the ETSI NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) architectural framework, which has been adopted and extended by 3GPP for managing virtualized network resources. The VIM's primary role is to oversee the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), which comprises the physical compute, storage, and networking hardware along with the hypervisor or containerization layer (the Virtualization Layer). It acts as the centralized controller for a single domain of infrastructure, typically a data center or a point of presence.

Operationally, the VIM works by exposing a set of northbound APIs (often based on OpenStack or other cloud management platforms) to receive instructions from the NFV Orchestrator (NFVO). These instructions include requests to allocate resources, instantiate Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), and manage their lifecycle. The VIM translates these high-level requests into specific commands for the underlying infrastructure. It manages the inventory of available physical and virtual resources, handles the provisioning of virtual machines or containers, allocates virtual networks and storage, and monitors the health and performance of the infrastructure. Key tasks include image management (storing VNF software images), resource catalog management, fault and performance management of the NFVI, and collecting usage records for billing or chargeback.

In a 3GPP context, the VIM is integrated into the broader Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework. While 3GPP does not standardize the VIM implementation itself, it defines the requirements and interfaces (such as the Or-Vi reference point between the NFVO and VIM) to ensure interoperability. The VIM is crucial for enabling cloud-native principles in telecom networks, allowing network functions like the vEPC or vIMS to be deployed as software on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. It provides the agility and efficiency of cloud computing to the telecom domain, supporting elastic scaling, rapid service deployment, and optimized resource utilization.

Purpose & Motivation

The VIM was created to address the fundamental challenge of managing the complex, disaggregated hardware resources in an NFV environment. Traditional telecom networks used tightly integrated, proprietary hardware appliances for each network function. The shift to NFV decouples software from hardware, but this requires a new layer of management to dynamically pool, allocate, and control compute, storage, and network resources in a standardized way.

Prior to NFV and the VIM concept, deploying a new network service required procuring, installing, and cabling physical appliances—a process taking months. The VIM, as part of the MANO stack, enables this process to be automated and software-driven, reducing deployment time to minutes. It solves the problem of resource silos and low utilization by implementing a cloud-like, shared infrastructure model. This dramatically increases operational efficiency and agility, allowing operators to launch new services rapidly and scale them on demand based on traffic patterns.

From a 3GPP perspective, the adoption of the VIM and the NFV framework was motivated by the need to support 5G and future networks. 5G's requirements for network slicing, ultra-low latency, and massive scale are economically and technically challenging with traditional hardware. The VIM provides the foundational resource control mechanism that makes network slicing possible—by carving out isolated sets of virtual resources from a shared physical pool for each slice. Its creation was a necessary step in the transformation of telecom networks into flexible, software-defined platforms capable of supporting diverse 5G use cases.