Add a Cell Site Group

You can add, manage, or delete a cell site group.

To add a cell site group, follow the steps:

Prerequisites

Obtain the network information required for configuration.

Procedure

1. Click Domains under Infrastructure Automation.
2. Click the Cell Site Group icon.
3. Click Add.

   The Add Domain page appears.

4. On the Add Domain page, provide the required information.
5. Click the button corresponding to Enabled, to enable the provisioning of the site. You cannot perform any operation on a disabled site.
6. To add an existing cell site group, click the button corresponding to Pre-Deployed. When you add a Pre-Deployed cell site group, you can override the following values.

   • DNS Suffix - Address of the DNS suffix.

   • DNS Server - The IP address of the DNS server.

   To configure the values, enable the Override and enter the required information in the corresponding Override Value.

   Note:

   • VMware Telco Cloud Automation does not perform any operation on a pre-deployed domain.

7. Enter the required details.

   Field	Description
   Name	The name of the site.
   Select Host Profile	Select the host profile from the drop-down list. The selected Host profile gets associated with each host in the cell site group.
   Parent Domain	Select the parent domain from the list. The parent site manages all the sites within the cell site group.
   Settings	You can modify the service settings for each site. These configurations override the global configuration available in Global Configuration tab on Configuration page. For more details on service parameters, see Configure Global Settings.

8. You can add new CSI categories or use the existing categories from the VMware VSphere server. You can also create tags corresponding to the CSI categories. To add the CSI Categories information, add the required information under Settings.
   Note:

   • To configure the CSI Categories, enable the Override for the CSI Tagging under Settings, and Override Value.

   • Once added, you cannot edit or remove the CSI configuration.

   • For CSI zone tag, ensure that the name must contain {hostname}. For example, <text_identifier>-{hostname}.

   Field	Description
   Use Existing	Whether to use the existing categories set in the underlying the VMware VSphere server. Click the corresponding button to activate or deactivate the option. Note: When using the Use Existing option, ensure that you provide the values for zone categories as set in the underlying VMware vSphere server. When creating Zone category in VMware VSphere, choose Hosts and Clusters under Associable Object Types.
   Zone	The CSI category for the compute clusters or hosts.
   CSI Zone Tag	The CSI tagging for the compute clusters or hosts.

9. Activate or deactivate the Enable datastore customizations option. By default, this feature is activated. However, you can deactivate it by clicking the toggle button.
   Note: The Enable datastore customizations field is available only for non-pre-deployed cell site groups.
   If you activate the datastore customization:

   • The datastores for all the hosts associated with this domain are named based on the disk capacity and free space. For example, if the hostname is host201-telco.example.com, the datastore with the highest capacity is named host201_localDS-0 where host201 is the prefix, which is the substring preceding the first hyphen (-) and 0 is the index representing the datastore with the highest capacity. The remaining datastores are named as host201-DO-NOT-USE-0, host201-DO-NOT-USE-1, and so on, where the indexes 0 and 1 represent the decreasing order of the free space. 0 represents the highest possible free space.
   • The customization is applicable to all the hosts in the domain.

   To change the delimiter for extracting prefixes from the host FQDNs, do the following:

   1. Ensure currently there are no active workflows i.e., the system is in a maintenance window.
   2. SSH to the TCA VM with admin credentials.
   3. Modify the kubernetes configmap with the following command:

      kubectl edit configmap tca-tcf-manager-config-override -n tca-mgr

      This opens the confimap in vi editor. Enter insert mode and make the required changes to DATASTORE_DELIMITER field and save the file.

   4. Delete the current tcf-manager pod. Kubernetes automatically brings up a new pod with the updated configmap.

      1. Run the following command to identify the pod in question: kubectl get pods -n tca-mgr | grep -i 'tca-tcf-manager'

      2. Select the pod which has the name in the pattern tca-tcf-manager-6676b5855c-c2gn5

      3. Delete the pod with the command: kubectl delete pod tca-tcf-manager-6676b5855c-c2gn5 -n tca-mgr

      4. Wait till the new pod is up and running. Keep executing the command kubectl get pods -n tca-mgr | grep -i 'tca-tcf-manager' a few times till a new pod is present with READY counter as 1/1 and STATUS as Running.

   Note: DATASTORE_DELIMITER is applicable only when the datastore customizations are enabled.

   If you deactivate the datastore customization:

   • The datastores for all the hosts associated with this domain are named in the order in which the datastores are fetched from vCenter. For example, if the host name is host201-telco.example.com, the datastores are named host201-telco-localDS-0, host201-telco-localDS-1, and so on, where host201-telco is the prefix, which is the first substring before the dot (.) in the hostname and the indexes 0 and 1 represent the order in which the datastores are fetched from vCenter.
10. Add the Switch Configuration information. Click plus icon to add more switches and uplinks.

    Field	Description
    Switch	The name of the switch.
    Uplinks	Select the network interface card (NIC) for the site under Uplinks. Note: A site requires a minimum of two NICs to communicate. NIC details should match the actual configuration across all ESXi servers.

11. Add the Networks information.
    Note:

    • System defines the Management network for a cell site group. User can create custom VLAN based application networks. All cell sites in a cell site group connect with same management network.

    • For the application network type, you can enable the mac address learning for the port groups. To enable the mac address learning, enable the Mac Learning available under Networks.

    Field	Description
    Name	The name of the network.
    Segment Type	Segment type of the network. Select the value from the list.
    Network Type	The type of the network.
    Switch	The switch details that the sites use for network access.
    VLAN	The VLAN ID for the network.

What to do next

Add Host to a Site.