The infrastructure cloud hosts three VMs for the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite, which discovers and manages servers and their components and orchestrates management clouds and workload clouds. Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite runs on a highly available cluster with three control planes (CPs) that use internal load balancers. The control planes are installed in a high availability (HA) configuration with a Global Controller (CP1) node and two redundant HA nodes (CP2 and CP3) for enhanced reliability and performance.
Each VM is managed by Kernel-based Virtual Machine running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The following figure shows the physical servers, the VMs they host, and the function of each VM in the infrastructure cloud:
- Infrastructure cloud acronyms
- DTIAS—Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite
- CP—control plane
- RHEL—Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Dell Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite
Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite provides infrastructure management and cloud orchestration services that work across a communication service provider's cloud environment. Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite runs in the infrastructure cloud. The following figure shows Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite's internal architecture:
Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite provides the following cloud orchestration services:
- Cloud Control Platform (CCP) API—the management interface used to configure and monitor Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite services.
- Identity and access management (IAM)—to control user management and authentication.
- File server—Longhorn-based file server that hosts the Customer Information Questionnaire files and ISO images that are required to deploy Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
- Gateway-service that routes traffic between user-driven tasks to internal components such as the CCP API.
Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite also provides infrastructure management services that provision and monitor servers and server components. Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite works with the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), a type of baseboard management controller for Dell PowerEdge servers, and supports site management, hardware discovery and provisioning, and health monitoring.
In Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat, Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite provides the following infrastructure management services:
- Management—manages hardware components and serves as the single source for hardware infrastructure status information. In Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat, Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite manages Infrastructure Block hardware in the infrastructure cloud, management cloud, and workload clouds.
- Discovery—For discovery operations, Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite onboards servers and adds them to a resource pool; applies hardware profiles such as golden configuration settings; and creates RAID arrays as needed in the onboarded servers.
- Monitoring—Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite retrieves the status of each server and supports a heartbeat mechanism to ensure that the servers hosting Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform can communicate and perform their functions. If this heartbeat fails, Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite does not perform any new operations until the heartbeat is reestablished, and any operations already underway are completed.
Benefits of Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite
Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat simplifies Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployment and reduces the amount of manual effort. Manually deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform typically includes the following:
- Optimizing BIOS settings based on the server role in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
- Ensuring firmware consistency across all servers
- Installing all parts of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Telecom Infrastructure Blocks for Red Hat uses Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite to automate those actions. Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite adds servers to a resource pool and identifies server hardware profiles and customizes the servers to meet the customer standards. When the server hardware profiles are set to customer standards, Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite deploys Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and assigns cloud roles to the servers.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform plug-in
During the management cloud and workload cloud deployments, there is constant communication between Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform through the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform plug-in. The Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform plug-in performs the following functions:
- Facilitates Telecom Infrastructure Automation Suite interaction with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
- Deploys operators at the cloud. For disconnected installations, can optionally deploy a Red Hat Quay operator-based registry on the management cloud and perform registry synchronization between the customer's managed local-registry and the Red Hat Quay registry.
- Configures operators such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation in their appropriate clouds
- Initiates cloud deployment using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes in the management cloud
- Retrieves cloud deployment status