VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Director Edition supports the following deployment designs:
Three-Pod Design: The Three-Pod design provides optimal flexibility and performance, because Edge Pods are dedicated to packet forwarding in and out of the virtual domain.
Two-Pod Design: The Two-Pod design is used for smaller deployments that combine the resource and edge Pods.
This Platform Deployment Guide focuses on the Three-Pod design. The Three-Pod design separates the VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure functional blocks by using Management Pod, Edge Pod, and Resource Pod for their functions. The initial deployment of a Three-Pod design consists of three vSphere clusters, one cluster per pod. You can scale up clusters by adding ESXi hosts and scale up pods by adding clusters to them.
The separation of management, edge, and resource functions in individually scalable pods allows you to plan the resource capacity according to the needs of the specific function that each pod hosts. For more details, see the Telco Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Director Edition Reference Architecture Guide 2.2.
