The Physical Tier represents compute hardware, storage, and physical networking resources for the Telco Cloud Platform RAN solution.
Physical ESXi Host
The configuration and assembly process of each ESXi host in Telco Cloud Platform RAN must be standardized, with all components installed in the same manner on each ESXi host. The standardization of the physical configuration of the ESXi hosts at Cell Sites removes variability, so you can operate an easily manageable and supportable infrastructure. Deploy ESXi hosts with identical configuration across all Cell Site locations, including storage and networking configurations as per VMware supported platform.
For the list of supported platforms, see the VMware Compatibility Guide
Physical Storage
VMware vSAN is used in the compute workload domains in Regional Data Center to provide highly available shared storage to the clusters. However, the host used for Cell Sites must have a local disk to provide the storage service to the RAN applications.
The ESXi host deployed at the Cell Site uses the local disk storage and all the disks recommended in the VMware Compatibility Guide.
The following table lists the sites and storage required for sites:
Site |
Storage Types |
|---|---|
Regional Data Center (RDC) |
vSAN |
Cell Site |
Local Storage |
Physical Network Interfaces
Consider the following for the Telco Cloud Platform RAN deployment with Regional Data Center and Cell Site combination:
For Regional Data Center (RDC), the ESXi hosts must contain four or more physical NICs of the same speed. Use two physical NICs for ESXi host traffic types and two physical NICs for user workloads.
For Cell Site, the ESXi hosts must contain a minimum of three physical NICs of the same speed. Use two physical NICs for ESXi management and user workloads and dedicate one for PTP time synchronization.
For each ESXi host in combination with a pair of ToR switches, use a minimum of two 10 GbE connections or 25 GbE or larger connections. 802.1Q network trunks support the required VLANs.
In case of a dual-socket host with NUMA placement, use six physical NICs. Each socket can be mapped with two physical NICs for user workload and one physical NIC for PTP time synchronization.
