The release notes cover the following topics:

About VMware Telco Cloud Operations

VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0 is a real-time automated service assurance solution designed to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical worlds. It provides holistic monitoring and network management across all layers for rapid insights, lowers costs, and improved customer experience. Powered by Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, VMware Telco Cloud Operations automatically establishes dynamic performance baselines, identifies anomalies, and alerts operators when abnormal behavior is detected.

VMware Telco Cloud Operations simplifies the approach to data extraction, enrichment, and analysis of network data across multi-vendor environments into actionable notifications and alerts to manage the growing business needs of Telco in an SDN environment.

For information about setting up and using VMware Telco Cloud Operations, see the VMware Telco Cloud Operations Documentation.

What's New in this Release

The VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0 introduces the following features:

  • Multi-Vendor SD-WAN Assurance:

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations supports monitoring of multi-vendor SD-WAN enterprise services, including VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud and Cisco Viptela.

    • Topology Discovery: Auto-discovery of complex Velocloud and Viptela SD-WAN edge and gateway connectivity, including edge-to-edge, edge-to-orchestrator, tunnels, and so on.
    • Network Issue Isolation: Fault isolation and impact assessment across edges, central and branch sites, gateways, and IP/MPLS/VPN networking on the WAN and LAN circuits.
    • Cross-Domain RCA: Apply codebook RCA across service, virtual, physical, and transport fault events.
    • Impact Analysis: Understand the impact of network issues within a site, across sites (edges), for the entire customer, tenant, and service.
    • High-Availability Risk Mitigation: Understand loss in High Availability (HA) links, secondary edges to mitigate impending outage.
    • Reliability Monitoring: Single unified dashboard of performance counters from edge and gateway devices providing overall health of the devices, bandwidth, latency, and packet loss for reliability monitoring.
    • Traffic Analysis: Detect and visualize source and destination type of traffic between the branches and identify anomalies in any abnormal traffic.
  • NetFlow Reporting:

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations includes a scalable-flow reporting engine to troubleshoot spikes in traffic using various reports (Top Talkers, Top Apps, and so on). It supports the report drill-down mechanism for users to quickly detect the type of application that is generating the traffic and its source and destination.

  • Dashboards and Reports:

    A new, scalable reporting engine that includes pre-packaged reports focused on various physical and virtual infrastructure domains. The reports cover availability, flow, health, inventory, and utilization.

    • The Smart Domain Manager notification and metric report is used for Smart Assurance notifications and metrics.

    • The Data Center report is used for viewing the health of compute, network and storage (physical and virtual).

    • Traffic Flow report to troubleshoot spikes in traffic, using various reports (Top Talkers, Top Apps, and so on). It supports the report drill-down mechanism for users.

    • Software Defined Networking report for SDN networks for VMware NSX and Cisco ACI networks.

    • vIMS report for IMS network infrastructure.

    • Baseline report calculating Hourly, Daily, and Weekly baseline reports on any collected metric.

    • Anomaly Detection and Trend report on metrics deviating the baseline.

  • Ad-hoc Reporting:

    Ability to create custom ad-hoc reports based on generic vendor-agnostic metric type models (SD-WAN, IP-SLA, Compute Health, Storage Health, Network Health, and so on) for reporting.

  • Unified Operations View:

    Unified view for the operations team to examine root cause notifications, topology, and health (fault and performance) of network infrastructure, and take necessary actions. The Operations UI is a versatile tool for monitoring and reporting performance data, topology data, and fault notifications for all aspects of your infrastructure. The Operations UI has modules that collect, aggregate, and insert data into one or more databases that the portal uses to display reports.

  • Performance Analytics Based Machine Learning:

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations integrates performance analytics and vivid reporting dashboards for proactive assurance. Using machine learning, VMware Telco Cloud Operations automatically establishes dynamic performance baselines, identifies anomalies, and alerts operators when abnormal behavior is detected.

  • Gateway:

    Kafka Gateway and Mapper for customers to ingest and map metric data from external systems such as MnR or any other third party data sources.

  • KPI Engine:

    Create single and composite KPIs based on various collected metrics. Also, the v1.0 release comes with pre-defined KPIs for various domains.

  • Alerting and Thresholding:

    Ability to create and configure alerts based on thresholds for each of the collected metrics, KPI, or event.

  • Virtual Appliance:

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations is available as a ready-to-run appliance based on the needs of the customers and templates. The deployment takes place within minutes without the need for installing and configuring any database, messaging, or operating system. This feature allows customers to get the product operational quickly.

  • Additional Features:

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0 includes following VMware Smart Assurance components to support discovery, monitoring, config management and RCA of IP, MPLS, SDN, NFV, SD-WAN, vEPC, and Virtualized infrastructure domains:

    • VMware Smart Assurance v10.1.2
      • ​Service Assurance Manager (SAM)
      • IP Availability Manager (IP)
      • Enterprise Server Manager (ESM)
      • Network Protocol Manager (NPM)
      • Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)
    • VMware Smart Assurance v10.1.1
      • Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

For information about system requirements, hardware requirements, and sizing guidelines, see the VMware Telco Cloud Operations Deployment Guide.

Known Issues

  • A possible cause for the deployment to fail is when you use the automated deployment tool.

    When you deploy VMware Telco Cloud Operations using the automated deployment tool, the deployment of the worker node may fail with the error: Failed to send data.

    Workaround: Modify the VCENTER_IP configuration parameter in the deploy.settings file to use the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). For more information about modifying the deploy.settings file, see the VMware Telco Cloud Operations Deployment Guide.

  • VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0 does not support integration to SAM server that has the CAS authentication setup for EDAA API.

    Workaround: Install a new SAM on a different path and start a new EDAA instance (Tomcat server) on a different port (port 1), without CAS authentication. The new EDAA instance points to the same SAM presentation server that the MnR integrates with using EDAA on a default port with CAS authentication.

    VMware Telco Cloud Operations connects to SAM-PRES using EDAA:port-1 without CAS authentication and MnR connects to the same SAM-PRES using EDAA:portdefault with CAS authentication.

    Note:
    You must modify the following lines in the server.xml file of the new SAM installation, to point to the new server ports.

    a. Server port="9005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN"
    b. Connector port="8090" protocol="HTTP/1.1"

    And, to start the Tomcat server, run the command ./sm_tomcat --output &

  • When the number of hops of connectivity is increased, you may experience performance issues in the topology maps.

    There might be performance issues in the rendering of  Redundancy Group, MPLS, Metro-E, and SDN connectivity map types in the Map Explorer view. This issue is observed on deployments with a complex topology where the topology maps may stop working when the number of hops of connectivity is increased.

  • When you create a Metrics Collector with incorrect inputs for Smart Assurance, it indicates that the collector is running, even though the connection is not established.

    When you provide an incorrect input during collector configuration, the collector appears to have started but it does not start. Verify the log to check the actual collector status.

  • VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0 does not support the SAM server with broker authentication, Edge Kafka authentication, and Smarts EDAA authentication. However, it exposes database ports for debugging purpose.

    For a workaround, see the Security Recommendation section in the VMware Telco Cloud Operations Deployment Guide.

  • SD-WAN report for Jitter (Tx v/s Rx) panel may not render correctly due to issues in the report query. ​

    To populate the reports correctly, add a space in the query condition.

  • When you select VeloCloud Orchestrator or Velocloud Tenant in the topology map, IPMultiMediaSubSystem Connectivity Map or SDN Physical Connectivity map appear by default. 

    Switch to the SD-WAN Connectivity map to view an actual topology map.

  • The Containment, Browse detail, Notification Acknowledge/Unacknowledge does not work when the primary Tomcat server fails in a Smart Assurance HA environment.

    In a Smart Assurance Failover deployment, when the primary Tomcat fails, the UI operations including the Notification Acknowledgement, Containment, Browse Detail, and Domain Managers fail.

    Workaround: When the primary Tomcat instance fails in a Smart Assurance failover environment, then you can manually point the VMware Telco Cloud Operations to a secondary Tomcat instance and restart the collectors.
    Procedure:

    1. Go to https://IPaddress of the Control Plane Node:1081.
    2. Navigate to SAM Config.
    3. Edit the EDAA value, to point to the secondary SAM.
    4. Update the Configs.
    5. Restart smarts-event-data-smarts-sam and smarts-topology-data-smarts-sam collectors in the VMware Telco Cloud Operations UI > Administration > Data Collectors.
  • Broker failover is not supported in VMware Telco Cloud Operations v1.0.

    Primary Broker fails in the Smart Assurance failover environment.

    Workaround: Currently when a Broker (multi-broker) failover happens in Smart Assurance, then it requires a manual intervention where you need to log in to VMware Telco Cloud Operations and change the Broker IP address to point to the new Broker IP.
    Procedure:

    1. Go to https://IPaddress of the Control Plane Node:1081.
    2. Navigate to SAM Config.
    3. Edit the Broker value, to point to the new Active Broker.
    4. Update the Configs.
    5. Restart smarts-event-data-smarts-sam and smarts-topology-data-smarts-sam collectors in the VMware Telco Cloud Operations UI > Administration > Data Collectors.
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