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VMware Telco Cloud Platform 2.2 | 08 MAR 2022

Check for additions and updates to these release notes.

Release Overview

Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition Release 2.2 brings together various key features and enhancements across carrier-grade workload compute, networking, network function automation and orchestration, and Kubernetes infrastructure areas.

This release allows the deployment of Tanzu Kubernetes management and workload clusters in the IPv6 networking environment. This release also supports VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously called Avi Vantage Platform) for Tanzu Kubernetes Workload clusters on vSphere. NSX Advanced Load Balancer supports L7 Ingress load balancing for workload clusters and functions as a control plane endpoint provider for management clusters.

Other key features of this release include CaaS and Infrastructure Automation enhancements, multi-tenancy support for Cluster API Provider vSphere (CAPV), multiple availability zones on vSphere, Airgapped feature enhancements, Managing Network Function and Network Service Lifecycle Operations, and High Availability of the Telco Cloud Automation platform.

What's New

Carrier-Grade VNF and CNF Automation and Orchestration

  • VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.0.1 introduces various new features and enhancements. Some key features are as follows:

    • CaaS and Infrastructure (SDDC) Automation Enhancements with new CaaS and Infrastructure automation capabilities, including enhanced Kubernetes upgrades, cluster observability, infrastructure automation support for vSphere 7.0U2, addition of secondary Multus networks through Late Binding, and better integration with VMware Cloud Director.

    • Airgapped Feature Enhancements include upgrading the airgapped servers with the high availability (HA) architecture to avoid temporary failures such as broken connection or temporary unreachability of the air-gapped server IP.  You can also deploy multiple air-gapped servers and expose a single virtual server through a third-party load balancer.

    • Platform Usability and Deployability Enhancements include Cloud Native re-architecture, context-based UI navigation, and license usage computation.

For more information, see the VMware Telco Cloud Automation 2.0.1 Release Notes.

Carrier-Grade Kubernetes Infrastructure

  • VMware Tanzu Standard for Telco introduces various key features as part of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4.2. Some of the key features are as follows:

    • Support for Kubernetes versions: 

      • 1.21.8

      • 1.20.14

      • 1.19.16

    • Addresses security vulnerabilities:

      • CVE-2022-0185

      • CVE-2021-4034

    • IPv6 Support for Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (vSphere Only): You can deploy Tanzu Kubernetes management and workload clusters in an IPv6 networking environment. For more information, see Deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on IPv6 (vSphere Only).

    • NSX Advanced Load Balancer Support for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere: Load balances traffic to Tanzu Kubernetes workload clusters and serves as a VIP endpoint for the management cluster. Using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB), you can configure L7 Ingress for Workload Clusters. With NSX ALB networking, each workload cluster has an Avi Kubernetes Operator (AKO) configuration. For more information, see Configure NSX ALB in Workload Clusters and Configure L7 Ingress with NSX Advanced Load Balancer for Workload Clusters.

For more information about other features and security vulnerability fixes, see the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4.2 Release Notes.

  • VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1.6-2p10 introduces various key features. Some key enhancements are related to Core Load Balancing, the lifespan of persistence entries, and so on. For more details, see the NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1.6-2p10 Release Notes. 

Carrier-Grade Resilient Networking and Security 

VMware NSX-T Data Center 3.2.0.1 introduces the following key enhancements across networking, load balancing, NSX Data Center for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center migration, security, services, and onboarding. This release also inherits enhancements from NSX-T Data Center 3.2.

  • Performance Enhancements: With NUMA-aware teaming policy, NSX now supports processing of the traffic on the same NUMA node as the pNICs used to leave ESXi. This feature enhances the performance in deployment leveraging teaming policies across multiple NUMA nodes. The 5-tuple ECMP hashing algorithm is supported on ESXi to allow a better distribution of the traffic across all the available Service Routers (SRs).

  • Enhancements to the NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center Migration Coordinator: Extends the coverage of the supported NSX for vSphere topologies and provides flexibility on the target NSX-T topologies.

  • Improved protection against Log4j vulnerability: Supports Apache Log4j version 2.16 to resolve the CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046 issues. For more information about these vulnerabilities and their impacts on VMware products, see VMSA-2021-0028.

  • Security: Enables extension of micro-segmentation to workloads deployed on vSphere networks. Provides enhanced L7 App IDs, Malware Detection, Prevention and Sandboxing, URL filtering, User-ID firewall, TLS inspection (Tech Preview) Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDS/IPS), and several other key security features.

For more information, see the VMware NSX-T Data Center 3.2.0.1 Release Notes and VMware NSX-T Data Center 3.2 Release Notes.

Workload Management, Storage, and Reliability Enhancements

VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3c includes the following key features and enhancements. This release also inherits features and enhancements from vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3.

  • Security Fixes: Covers critical vulnerabilities in Apache Log4j identified by CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046.

  • Performance Improvement (MTU size greater than 9000 bytes): With vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3, you can set the size of the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) on a vSphere Distributed Switch to a maximum of 9190 bytes to support switches with larger packet sizes.

  • Extended support for disk drives types: vSphere Lifecycle Manager can validate additional types of disk drives and storage device configurations including HDD, SSD, and SAS/SATA disk drives.

  • Improved interoperability between vCenter Server and ESXi versions: vCenter Server can manage ESXi hosts from the previous two major releases and any ESXi host from version 7.0 and later.

  • vSphere Memory Monitoring and Remediation: Provides visibility into performance statistics to determine if the application workload is regressed due to Memory Mode. Snapshots of PMem VMs are also supported.

  • vSphere Zero Downtime Fault Tolerance: VMs fallback to the secondary VM, instead of failing. Hence, mission-critical VMs can achieve zero downtime and zero data loss in case of Machine Check Exception (MCE) hardware failure.

  • vSAN Management: You can use vSphere Lifecycle Manager images to manage a vSAN stretched cluster and its witness host.

For more information, see the VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3c Release Notes and VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3 Release notes.

VMware vSAN 7.0 Update 3c introduces the following key enhancements:

  • Simplified Operations: Supports easy vSAN cluster shutdown and restart, enhanced network monitoring and anomaly detection, vSAN health check correlation, and so on.

  • Platform Enhancements: Provides stretched cluster site and witness failure resiliency, nested fault domains for two-node deployments, stuck I/O enhancements, and so on.

For more information, see the VMware vSAN 7.0 Update 3c Release Notes.

Components

Mandatory Add-On Components

Note: Additional license is required.

Optional Add-On Components

Note: Additional license is required.

Support for Backward Compatibility of CaaS Layer with IaaS Layer

VMware Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition Release 2.2 supports backward compatibility of its CaaS layer components (Telco Cloud Automation and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid) with the IaaS Layer components (vSphere and NSX-T Data Center) in earlier versions of the Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition. With this feature, you can upgrade the CaaS layer components to their latest versions while using earlier versions of the IaaS layer components.

For more information, see the Telco Cloud Automation 2.0.1 Release Notes.

End of General Support Guidance

VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix outlines the End of General Support (EoGS) dates for VMware products. Lifecycle planning is required to keep each component of the VMware Telco Cloud Platform solution in a supported state. Plan the component updates and upgrades according to the EoGS dates. To ensure that the component versions are supported, you may need to update the Telco Cloud Platform solution to its latest maintenance release.

VMware pre-approval is required to use a product past its EoGS date. To discuss the extended support of products, contact your VMware representative.

Note: If you purchase NSX-T Data Center as part of the Telco Cloud Platform bundles, NSX-T Data Center is entitled to the support lifecycle specific to the Telco Cloud Platform bundles. The entitlement details for NSX-T 3.2.x are as follows:  

  • General Availability: 2021-12-16

  • End of General Support: 2026-12-16

The Technical Guidance phase is not available for this product lifecycle. To receive new severity 1 bug fixes and security updates, upgrade NSX-T Data Center to the latest maintenance release in the 3.2.x release series.

Known Issues

  • Sometimes Internal Server Error Occurs While Performing any Operation with Kubernetes in Telco Cloud Automation

    While you perform any operation with Kubernetes in Telco Cloud Automation, sometimes the following error occurs:

    Internal server error:
NodePolicyJob. Error: Unable to connect to Bootstrapper. Error: 'HttpHostConnectException'. Please restart Bootstrapper Service in TCA CP if the issue persists. Contact System Administrator for more help

    Workaround:

    1. Verify whether the Bootstrapper service is running in the Telco Cloud Automation-Control Plane Appliance. If it is not running, start the Bootstrapper service.

    2. Retry the operation that you were performing with Kubernetes.

  • CaaS Cluster Deployments Not Supported on vCenter Servers Containing Multiple Data Centers

    CaaS Cluster deployments are not supported on vCenter Servers that contain multiple data centers.

    Workaround: None

  • Host Profile Changes Not Applied When VMs are Running on the ESXi Host

    If VMs are running on the ESXi host, the changes you made to the Host Profile are not applied.

    Workaround: Before making the Host Profile changes, power off all the VMs on the ESXi host.

  • Infrastructure Automation deploys the old versions of Workload Domain components in Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition 2.2

    When you use Infrastructure Automation to deploy Workload Domains, the old versions of components are deployed instead of the latest versions supported in Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition 2.2. This issue is due to the reliance of Infrastructure Automation on Cloud Builder.

    Workaround: After creating the Workload Domain, upgrade the components to the supported versions manually.

  • CNF Instantiation Failure Occurs Due to High Disk Space Consumption in Telco Cloud Automation

    The journal logs of the Telco Cloud Automation-Control Plane Appliance do not roll over as expected. This issue fills the root partition causing the CNF instantiation failure.

    Workaround: As a temporary workaround, free up the disk space. To ensure that the issue does not occur quickly again, re-configure the log rotation value. For more information, see KB article 87719.

Release Notes Change Log

Date

Change

20 JUL 2022

Information about the support for backward compatibility of CaaS Layer with IaaS Layer is added.

Support Resources

For additional support resources, see the VMware Telco Cloud Platform documentation page.

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