Design Considerations

A Two-Pod configuration provides a compact footprint design choice for telco workloads.

Footprint

A high level of resiliency is provided by using four-host clusters with vSAN storage in the initial deployment. Four-host clusters also ensure a highly available Management Pod design, because clustered management components such as vCenter Server active, standby, and witness nodes can be placed on separate hosts. The same design principle is used for clustered vCloud Director components such as database nodes.

With high-end class servers, this design maximizes the resource utilization and densification of workloads and Edge Nodes in the same Pod.

Scale Flexibility

The initial number and sizing of management components in the Management Pod should be planned. As a result, the capacity requirement for the Management Pod can remain steady. When planning the storage capacity of the Management Pod, the CSP should consider the operational headroom for VNF files, snapshots, backups, VM templates, OS images, upgrade files, and log files.

The sizing of the collapsed Edge and Resource cluster changes according to the VNF and networking requirements. When planning the capacity of the Edge and Resource Pod, tenants must work with VNF vendors to gather requirements for the VNF to be deployed. Such information is typically available from VNF vendors as deployment and sizing guidelines. These guidelines are directly related to the scale of the VNF service, for example, the number of subscribers to be supported. Also, the capacity utilization of Edge Nodes must be considered, especially when more instances of Edge Nodes are deployed to scale up as the number of VNFs increases.

When scaling up the Edge and Resource Pod by adding hosts to the cluster, the newly added resources are automatically pooled, resulting in added capacity to the compute cluster. New tenants can be provisioned to consume resources from the total pooled capacity that is available. Allocation settings for existing tenants must be modified before they can benefit from increased resource availability.

Operations Management

The Management Pod provides a centralized operation across the deployment topology, be it a single or distributed data center.