4 The **Pharos Specification** defines a hardware environment for deployment and testing of the **Brahmaputra**
5 platform release. The **Pharos Project** is also responsible for defining lab capabilities, developing
6 management/usage policies and process; and a support plan for reliable access to project and release resources.
7 Community labs are provided as a service by companies and are not controlled by Pharos however our objective is
8 to provide easy visibility of all lab capabilities and their usage at all-times.
10 Pharos lab infrastructure has the following objectives:
11 - Provides secure, scalable, standard and HA environments for feature development
12 - Supports the full Brahmaputra deployment lifecycle (this requires a **bare-metal** environment)
13 - Supports functional and performance testing of the Brahmaputra release
14 - Provides mechanisms and procedures for secure remote access to Pharos compliant environments for OPNFV community
16 Deploying Brahmaputra in a Virtualized environment is possible and will be useful, however it does not provide a fully
17 featured deployment and realistic test environment for the Brahmaputra release of OPNFV.
19 The high level architecture is outlined in the following diagram:
21 .. image:: ../images/pharos-archi1.jpg