VMware Telco Cloud Automation consists of two components: Telco Cloud Manager and a Telco Cloud Automation control plane. Telco Cloud Manager provides telco operators with NFV MANO capabilities and enables the automation of deployment and configuration of the NFs and network services. The Telco Cloud Automation control plane provides the infrastructure for placing workloads across the clouds.
VMware Telco Cloud Automation implements the solution’s high-level architecture through logical building blocks and core components, as shown in the following figure:
Figure 17. VMware Telco Cloud Automation architecture
Network services
The network services that are shown in Figure 17 are:
- vCenter Server: Used for authenticating and signing into VMware Telco Cloud Automation.
- SOL 003 SVNFM: Any SOL 003 SVNFM that can be registered with VMware Telco Cloud Automation.
- VMware Telco Cloud Automation Control Plane (TCA-CP): Deployed on the VIM and paired with VMware Telco Cloud Automation Manager.
- VMware Telco Cloud Automation Manager: Connects with TCA-CP to communicate with the VIMs. The VIMs are cloud platforms such as vCloud Director, vSphere, Kubernetes cluster, or VMware Integrated OpenStack.
- vRealize Orchestrator: Registered with TCA-CP and used to run NFV workflows. Customers can register for each VIM or for the entire network of VIMs.
The following figure shows the Telco Cloud Automation integration points:
Figure 18. Telco Cloud Automation interoperability
Interoperability points
- SOL 001 (ETSI GS NFV SOL 001) refers to VNF Descriptor (VNFD), a recipe from the VNF provider that describes all the components of its VNF and how they are interconnected. SOL 001 covers VNFD and Network Service Descriptor (NSD) in accordance with ETSI GS NFV-IFA 011. All NFs designed with Telco Cloud Automation are compliant with SOL 001 version 2.5.1.
- VNFD is packaged with manifest files, software images, and additional files in a VNF package known as CSAR (Cloud Service Archive), a zip file in a format that conforms with YAML specification version 1.2 in accordance with ETSI GS NFV SOL 004.
- Other interfaces include ETSI GS NFV SOL 003 for integration of external generic NFV orchestrators, ETSI NFV IFA008/SOL002 for third-party EMS integration, Or-VNfm ETSI NFV IFA007/SOL003 for VNF Manager (VNFM) integration, and Os-Ma ETSI NFV IFA013/SOL005 for OSS/BSS integration. For more information, see Network Functions Virtualization from ETSI.