The deployment topology for 5G core and RAN architecture commonly used by Communication Service Providers (CSPs) can be realized by building the data center and network infrastructure based on hierarchical layers.
In this blog I’ll give a short commentary about the placement of components at each site. Since we have hierarchical layer design this placement is important.
Central and Regional sites have 4 hosts in a cluster & shared datastore is configured at the cluster level. Cell Site hosts are added as individual hosts and have local datastore.
The management components / Core components are placed in Central Site. The Kubernetes cluster for CU deployment is at Regional Site & DU is deployed on DU host at the Cell Site. The steps to Install & Configure management components & Kubernetes cluster are not covered here, Please refer documentation for the same.
Notice that DU workload clusters control plane is at Regional Site & Worker Nodes are at Cell Site. The configuration needed in this case for proper functioning of the storage is mentioned in blog – Stretched cluster design on my site.
Lets have a look at the components
| Site | Server | Component |
| Central Site | Host 1 | vCenter Central, TCA Manager |
| Host 2 | vCenter Regional, TCA CP Central | |
| Host 3 | TCA CP Regional | |
| Host 4 | vRealize Orchestrator | |
| Regional Site | Host 1 | TKG Management Control Plane, TKG Management Worker node |
| Host 2 | TKG CU Workload Control Plane, TKG CU Workload Worker Node 1 | |
| Host 3 | TKG CU Workload Worker Node 2 | |
| Host 4 | TKG DU Workload Control Plane | |
| Cell Site | Host 1 | TKG DU Workload Worker Node 1 |
| Host 2 | TKG DU Workload Worker Node 2 | |
| Host n | TKG DU Workload Worker Node 3 |
Note that during deployment and bring up the components will be placed randomly on the cluster servers as per the resources availability & balanced as per DRS settings.
Hope this helps in software component & Kubernetes cluster placement design.