This section describes common external services such as DNS, DHCP, NTP, and NFS required for the Telco Cloud.

Various external services are required for the deployment of the Telco Cloud components and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters. If you deploy the Telco Cloud solution in a greenfield environment, you must first deploy your Central Data Center and Management Domain, and then onboard workload domains as required.

The following table lists the required external services and dependencies for the Telco Cloud:

Service

Purpose

Domain Name Services (DNS)

Provides name resolution for various components of the Telco Cloud Platform

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

Provides automated IP address allocation for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters throughout the workload domain

Note: Ensure that the DHCP service is available local to each site for optimal deployment configuration.

Network File System (NFS)

Provides shared storage and data transfer between Cloud Director cells.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Performs time synchronization between the Telco Cloud management components
Note:

LDAP is not a hard requirement, although it is the predominant solution used for providing a centralized user management platform across all components of the telco cloud.

DNS

When you deploy the telco cloud platform, each component from the management domain, including the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters within the domain, requires the DNS to be configured for proper addressing through the application FQDN.

DNS resolution must be available for all the components in the solution, including servers, Virtual Machines (VMs), and virtual IPs for Load-Balancer services. Before you deploy the Telco Cloud management components or create workload domains, ensure that both forward and reverse DNS resolutions are created for each component.

DHCP

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is required to automatically configure Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster nodes with an IPv4 address. For each Workload domain, DHCP services must be provided locally (for example, through NSX) or remotely from outside the workload domain.

The DHCP scope must be defined and made available to accommodate all the initial and future Kubernetes workloads used in the Telco Cloud Platform.

Note:

After deploying the control plane nodes, swap the DHCP allocated addresses of the control plane nodes to a static reservation. Thus, the node always receives the same address upon reboot. This is important to maintain kube-vip stability.

For more information about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid IP Addressing, see Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster Design.

NTP

All the management components of the Telco Cloud must be synchronized against a common time by using the Network Time Protocol (NTP):

  • vCenter Servers and ESXi Host

  • NSX Managers and edge nodes

  • NSX Advanced Load Balancer and service engines

  • Cloud Director cells

  • Telco Cloud Automation Manager and Control Plane nodes

  • Aria Operations components

Note:

The Telco Cloud components such as vCenter Server Single Sign-On (SSO) are sensitive to a time drift between distributed components. The synchronized time between various components also assists with troubleshooting efforts.

The following guidelines apply to the NTP sources:

  • The IP addresses of NTP sources can be provided during the initial deployment of Telco Cloud management components

  • The NTP sources must be reachable by all the components in the Telco Cloud Platform.

  • Time skew between NTP sources must be less than 5 minutes.