This reference architecture assumes a separate network connection over Layer 3 for management connectivity between the management components and its edge sites. This management connectivity includes traffic between vCenter Server and Edge site ESXi hosts. NSX Manager also uses this connectivity for management of NSX Edge Nodes at the Edge site.

A pair of NSX-T Edge Nodes (in the VM form factor) is used at each Edge site for the logical to the physical network and also to help with the mapping of tenant gateways when a multi-tenant environment is required. Note that the segmentation of tenants and QoS at the networking level might increase the number of Edge Nodes per site.

Note:

The end-to-end round-trip latency between any Edge site and core site should not exceed 150 ms. Recommended bandwidth between the Edge and core sites is 10 Gbps. VLAN-based network segmentation is restricted within a data center. There is no VLAN stretching between the core and Edge sites.

Network Redundancy

The Telco Cloud Infrastructure Edge Architecture configuration has Edge nodes (in the VM form factor) in active/active mode to connect to the Provider Edge (PE) router at the Edge site. To define the high availability configuration for the edge node, the administrator from the Core data center must use a control plane network.

Operations Management

There are two models for placement of the operations management components such as vROps, vRNI, and vRLI:

  • The central components of these products are always placed at the core site. Scaling of these products depends on the number of Edge sites under management and the total number of workloads at those Edge sites.

  • The remote collector components of these components are to be placed at the Edge sites.

There are three collectors: Remote Collector for vROps, Proxy for vRNI, and Syslog collector for vRLI. These monitoring components should be placed next to the management components they pull their metrics from, such as vCenter Server, and NSX Manger.

Network Tenancy

The Telco Cloud Infrastructure Edge Architecture relies on NSX-T to provide network tenancy for end-to-end isolation capabilities by deploying multiple tiers of distributed routing through Tier-0 gateways, VRFs, and Tier-1 gateways in the networking stack.

The uplink of a Tier-0 gateway and VRFs that resides in NSX-T Edge are connected to upstream physical routers. A tenant uses a Tier-1 gateway at its Edge to connect to the Tier-0 gateway. Tier-0 gateways and VRFs relay traffic to other tenants on the upstream router at each side of the Core data center or Edge site. Network virtualization capabilities with Geneve encapsulation provide flexibility in-line with industry standards. NSX-T Data Center performance enhancements for N-VDS and NSX Edge Nodes offer advanced network capabilities.

Each tenant's traffic is associated with a different VLAN behind the per-tenant WAN access. Similar to a physical switch, an N-VDS Uplink port can carry multiple VLANs encapsulated on the single connected link using IEEE 802.1q.