In addition to properly engineered physical networking, special consideration must be given for overlay networking and north-south traffic. VMware uses NSX Edge Nodes as the gateway between the virtual and physical domains for overlay networks. This section includes considerations for properly engineered Edge Nodes.
NSX Edge Pods are expected to process all north-south data traffic, a high-end server is required for this function. For Bare Metal Edge, select the hardware that meets the requirements for the throughput you want to achieve.
Physical NICs: Use the NICs that provide sufficient bandwidth and throughput to meet your application requirements. For scaling the bandwith, consider factors such Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to control the bundling of several physical links together to form a single logical link.
CPU: Select a vendor for the CPU as Bare Metal Edge supports a broad list of processors from Intel and AMD. Other considerations include:
Number of CPU cores: Defines how many parallel tasks can be run. It has a direct correlation with how much throughput the edge node can service.
Clock speed of the CPU (measured in GHz): Defines how many cycles the CPU executes per second.
Memory: Selecting a memory with high transfer speed or mega transfer per second (MT/s) influence the maximum throughput.
PCI Slots: Network cards must be installed in PCIe slots with enough bandwidth to support their maximum throughput. When selecting servers, you need to determine the PCI-E generation and whether the card you want to use supports PCI-E slot generation 3, generation 4, or generation 5.
For information about NSX Edge Nodes, see the NSX design section in the VMware Telco Cloud Reference Architecture Guide. For in-depth information about NSX Bare Metal tuning, see Tuning 5G Workloads on Overlay Network.
