Telecommunication operators are in need of a disaggregated and distributed virtual infrastructure that allows them to selectively place workloads closer to the subscriber, especially with the advent of 5G networks. These distributed mini or micro data centers are broadly termed Telco Edge sites. The geography of a country coupled with its population density can lead a typical Telco operator to deploy thousands of these Edge sites to cater to multiple use cases.
With high data throughput, low latency, and large number of devices that 5G networks need to support, Telecom operators can introduce new services to the marketplace. The ability to deploy new services quickly and at scale is a key requirement to monetize this market opportunity effectively. To do this, Telecom operators need their virtual infrastructure to be distributed, scalable, and manageable.
The VMware vCloud NFV platform is a carrier grade NFV Infrastructure with VMware® Integrated OpenStack and VMware vCloud Director as the two options for NFV Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM).
This reference architecture describes how vCloud NFV, with VMware Integrated OpenStack as the VIM, can be deployed in a disaggregated and distributed fashion to meet the growing needs of the Telco Edge use case.
The VMware vCloud NFV platform is a modular multi-tenant virtual infrastructure with abstractions to enable multi-vendor, multi-domain, and multi-cloud execution environments. The centralized VMware Integrated OpenStack management instance provides the IaaS layer to manage the workload placement and management across multiple Telco Edge sites that are distributed geographically. By supporting standard OpenStack interfaces, the platform inter-operates with external service orchestration and management functions. Being based on the same virtualization infrastructure, the vCloud NFV platform for Telco Edge runs both control plane and data plane workloads, but now in a disaggregated and distributed manner.
In addition to the core NFV infrastructure components for compute, storage, networking, and VIM, the vCloud NFV platform includes a fully integrated suite for operational intelligence and monitoring. This suite is used to enhance the run-time environments further with workflows for dynamic workload optimization and proactive issue avoidance.
