  As Communication Service Providers (CSPs) adopt the Network Function
Virtualization (NFV) paradigm, they need to transition their network function
capacity to a virtualized infrastructure with different Network Functions
running on a set of heterogeneous servers. This abstract describes a novel
technique for allocating server resources (compute, storage and network) for a
given set of Virtual Network Function (VNF) requirements. Our approach helps
the telco providers decide the most effective way to run several VNFs on
servers with different performance characteristics. Our analysis of prior VNF
performance characterization on heterogeneous/different server resource
allocations shows that the ability to arbitrarily create many VNFs among
different servers' resource allocations leads to a comparative advantage among
servers. We propose a VNF resource allocation method called COMPARE that
maximizes the total throughput of the system by formulating this resource
allocation problem as a comparative advantage problem among heterogeneous
servers. There several applications for using the VNF resource allocation from
COMPARE including transitioning current Telco deployments to NFV based
solutions and providing initial VNF placement for Service Function Chain (SFC)
provisioning.
