Feature Request Overview

The user goal is to enable customers to migrate Virtualized Network Function (VNF) workloads that are currently deployed, managed, and expressed as Heat stacks from a source OpenStack cloud to a target OpenStack cloud using os-migrate. This is critical for customers, particularly those in the telecom space, whose VNF lifecycle is managed by an external MANO system which interacts with OpenStack primarily through the Heat orchestration service. The current limitations of os-migrate prevent a direct, orchestrated migration of the VNF's declarative state, which leads to complex, error-prone manual re-deployment or requires the MANO to re-orchestrate the workload after manual resource migration.

Business justification 

This feature would provide the following key benefits to customers:

• Enables Migration of Critical VNF Workloads: Directly addresses the need to move telecom/network workloads (VNFs) which are often stateful and highly dependent on declarative orchestration for configuration, scaling, and networking.

• Reduced Migration Complexity and Risk: By migrating the Heat stack definition and optionally the stack state, customers can preserve the declarative state of the workload, allowing the MANO system to resume management seamlessly on the target cloud. This drastically reduces the risk of deployment errors, configuration drift, and service disruption compared to manual resource migration and re-deployment.

• Reduced Downtime: An automated, orchestrated stack migration process will be significantly faster than manual reconstruction of the VNF environment, minimizing the service interruption window.

• Full Lifecycle Management Preservation: Ensures that the MANO system, which relies on the Heat stack existence and state for VNF management (updates, scaling, healing), can maintain control over the VNF workload immediately post-migration.

Functional requirements (mandatory - Complete while in New status){_}
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The result of this feature should be the capability to perform an export/import of Heat stacks that represent VNF workloads, ensuring the target stack is functionally equivalent and manageable by the external MANO.

Describe the customer impact

This feature has a high customer impact, particularly for customers in the telecommunications and networking sectors who heavily utilize OpenStack as a Virtualization Infrastructure Manager (VIM) for their Network Function Virtualization (NFV) strategy.

The primary impact is the unblocking of cloud migration projects for environments where VNF workloads are centrally managed by sophisticated MANO systems (e.g., Open Source MANO - OSM, or commercial MANO products). Without this feature, the migration of these critical, production-level workloads is either impossible without extensive service interruption or requires a major, high-risk operational change to the VNF lifecycle management process. This feature will provide a supported, automated, and repeatable path for migrating essential telecom infrastructure.

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