In two-pod design, the Management pod is implemented as a cluster, governed by the first vCenter Server instance. The components of the pod benefit from cluster's features such as resource management, high availability, and resiliency, to form the foundation of a carrier grade virtual infrastructure management. A second vCenter Server instance is deployed in the Management pod to oversee the Edge/Resource pod.
Each vCenter Server instance is a virtual appliance deployed with an embedded database. The vCenter Server Appliance is preconfigured, hardened, and fast to deploy. Use of the appliance allows for a simplified design, eases management, and reduces administrative efforts. vCenter Server Appliance availability is ensured using a three-node cluster. This consists of one active node that serves client requests, one passive node as backup in the event of failure, and one quorum node referred to as the witness node. Replication between nodes ensures that vCenter Server Appliance data is always synchronized and up-to-date
The Platform Services Controller contains common infrastructure security services such as VMware vCenter® Single Sign-On, VMware Certificate Authority, licensing, and server reservation and certificate management services. The Platform Services Controller handles identity management for administrators and applications that interact with the vSphere platform. Each pair of Platform Services Controllers is configured to use a separate vCenter Single Sign On domain. This approach secures the management components by maintaining administrative separation between the two pods. Platform Services Controllers are deployed as load balanced appliances external to vCenter Server for high availability. An NSX ESG instance is used as the load balancer between the Platform Services Controllers and their respective vCenter Server instances.
Each vCenter Server instance and its Platform Services Controller data retention is ensured by using the native backup service that is built in the appliances. This backup is performed to a separate storage system by using network protocols such as SFTP, HTTPS, and SCP.
Local storage drives on the ESXi hosts are pooled into a highly available shared vSAN datastore for optimum utilization of storage capacity. Each cluster has its own vSAN datastore, an abstracted representation of the storage into which virtual machine persistent data is stored. All management components are stored in the management cluster datastore, while VNF workloads deployed from VMware Integrated OpenStack are stored in the resource cluster datastore. This allows for the separation of administrative, performance, and failure storage boundaries for management and VNF workloads.
