Under the Three-Pod design, the Telco Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Director Edition platform contains a management pod, an edge pod, and a resource pod. Two separate vCenter Server instances are deployed. One to manage the management pod and another to manage the resource and edge pods.
Management Pod: Hosts all TCI management components. Its functions include resource orchestration, analytics, BCDR, third-party management, TCI-O, and other ancillary management.
Edge Pod: Hosts the NSX-T Data Center network components that are the NSX Edge nodes. Edge nodes participate in East-West traffic forwarding and provide connectivity to the physical infrastructure for North-South traffic management and capabilities. You can deploy Edge nodes on a VM and bare-metal form factor to meet the capacity and performance needs.
Resource Pod: Provides virtualized compute, network, and storage, to running workloads.
VMware Cloud Director and VMware vRealize Orchestrator load balancer Edges must be deployed inside the management Pod.