The platform services domain represents the capabilities that vCloud Director for Service Providers delivers to the NFV platform. VNFs, VNF managers, and other components running within the vCloud NFV platform can use these capabilities.
Edge Services - VMware NSX-T Data Center
NSX-T Data Center provides two classes of routing capabilities, Distributed Router (DR) and Service Router (SR). The Service Router capability provides services such as NAT, firewall, load balancer, and so on. It also provides a Tier-0 and Tier-1 router that VNFs can employ with stateful and stateless options. The Edge services cannot be distributed and require a centralized pool of capacity with high availability and scalability. The appliances that host the centralized services or SR instances are called Edge Nodes. These nodes also provide connectivity to the physical infrastructure.
Analytics – VMware vRealize Operations Manager
The vCloud NFV platform is fully integrated with an operations management solution for day 1 and day 2 operations for health monitoring, issue avoidance, and closed-loop automation. This way, the platform provides infrastructure assurance out of the box. The analytics framework can be used by network function and application developers to ingest and correlate their services-specific data in vRealize Operations Manager and leverage its capabilities seamlessly. The framework provides various mechanisms through management and content packs for data management and closed-loop automation with workflows that are custom to their operations and planning needs.
Policy Consistency
The vCloud NFV platform components utilize policy-based frameworks that can be defined once and applied at runtime to maintain the desired end state. The decision and enforcement split makes the management and operation of the platform and its services highly flexible, which operations and applications can leverage. Policies in compute can be used for right-sizing the infrastructure to ensure capacity and performance. Workload placement and runtime optimization for DRS and vMotion can be prescribed with platform awareness. Policies in networking range in physical networking such as teaming, network management and control, and security for East-West and perimeter traffic control. Storage policies provide services such as availability levels, capacity consumption, and stripe widths for performance. Policies in operations can help to ensure that SLAs are met with configurable alerting, recommendation, and remediation framework.
Programmability
The VMware vCloud NFV solution is a fully open platform supporting flexible APIs and SDKs. For more information on the VMware APIs, see the VMware API Explorer.
