The vCloud NFV facilitates combining the Edge and resource functionality in a single, collapsed Pod that provides a small footprint. CSPs can use a Two-Pod design to gain operational experience with the vCloud NFV platform. As demand grows, they can scale up and scale out within the Two-Pod construct.

An initial Two-Pod deployment consists of one cluster for the Management Pod and another cluster for the collapsed Edge & Resource Pod. Clusters are vSphere objects for pooling virtual domain resources and managing resource allocation. Clusters scale up as needed by adding ESXi hosts, whereas Pods scale up by adding new clusters to the existing Pods. This design ensures that the management boundaries are clearly defined, capacity is managed, and resources are allocated based on the functionality that the Pod hosts. The vCloud NFV VIM components allow for fine grained allocation and partitioning of resources to the workloads, regardless of the scaling method that is used.

The following diagram shows a Two-Pod design with all management functions located centrally in the Management Pod. Edge and resource functions are combined in the collapsed Edge and Resource Pod. During the initial deployment, two clusters of ESXi hosts are used: one for the Management Pod and another for the collapsed Edge and Resource Pod. Additional clusters can be added to each Pod as the infrastructure is scaled up.

Figure 1. Two-Pod Conceptual Design
Two-Pod Conceptual Design

Logical View

  • Management Pod: This Pod hosts all NFV management components. These components include resource orchestration, analytics, BCDR, third-party management, NFVO, and other ancillary management.

  • Edge and Resource Pod: This Pod provides the virtualized runtime environment (compute, network, and storage) to execute workloads. It also consolidates the NSX Edge Node to participate in the East-West traffic and to provide connectivity to the physical infrastructure for North-South traffic management capabilities. Edge Nodes can be deployed in a VM form factor only.

Routing and Switching

Before deploying a Two-Pod configuration, a VLAN design needs to be considered as a best practice to isolate the traffic for infrastructure, VMs, and VIM.

The general design of the routing and switching fabric is similar to the Three-Pod design, with the resource and Edge fabric converged into a single pod.