Ixia

Proximus, the largest internet service provider (ISP) in Belgium, embarked on a network function virtualization (NFV) initiative in 2018. The project involved deploying various telecommunication applications using a cloud infrastructure, including virtual IP multimedia subsystems (vIMS), and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). However, migrating complex physical ISP networks to a new network with virtualized functions was a long-term project, taking several years. During this transition, Proximus faced the challenge of maintaining the same visibility and analytics across both physical and virtual functions. The company had deployed several traffic analytics probes that relied on physical taps, tap aggregation switches, and Keysight Vision network packet brokers in the legacy environment. However, in the new virtual environment, network functions ran as virtual machines (VMs) on the same physical server, and the east-west traffic did not cross any of the physical links where the physical taps would have been located. Proximus needed to maintain the same level of visibility in the virtual environment as in the physical one, while also containing the total cost of ownership.