Within the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) layer, VMs with VMware Photon OS as the guest OS are used as container hosts to provision Tanzu Kubernetes clusters. The container hosts that host the CNFs are commonly called Worker Node VMs or Worker Nodes. You must apply several compute and network best practices directly to the Worker Nodes to meet the performance requirements of the data plane CNFs.
Most of the VM best practices described in the previous vCloud NFV Performance Tuning Guide remain valid for the Worker Nodes, but they must be revisited in terms of the CaaS layer provisioning. In Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition, VMware Telco Cloud Automation™ is used to configure the performance requirements of the data plane CNFs during CNF onboarding. These performance requirements include the Worker Node (VM) specification, Photon OS customization, networking configuration, CPU affinity, and NUMA considerations.
A CNF vendor can use the Cloud Service Archive (CSAR) package of the CNF to specify performance requirements on the CaaS layer. VMware Telco Cloud Automation customizes the Worker Node configuration based on those requirements. For more details, see Customizing Network Function Infrastructure Requirements in the Telco Cloud Automation documentation.
