7.3 Cloud Platform Management Cluster
With the growth seen in new VMware management components and services, a dedicated, out-of-band cloud platform management cluster now has significant advantages for all VMware customers, but for service providers hosting a large and often complex cloud management platform (CMP), it is essential. The cloud platform management cluster contains all of the core components and the services required to run the virtual infrastructure and CMP, and is maintained separately from tenant workloads. Separating the management infrastructure components from tenant workloads allows for better segmentation of resources and improves the manageability and security of the vSphere and CMP infrastructure.
Providing the service provider infrastructure with a dedicated management cluster and management component separation has the following benefits:
• Separates the management components from the resources they are managing.
• Facilitates quicker troubleshooting and problem resolution, because management components are strictly contained in a relatively small and manageable cluster.
• Isolates resources between workloads running in the tenanted environment and the actual systems used to manage the cloud platform to avoid resource contention.
• Improves the ability to upgrade the vSphere environment and related components without affecting the tenant workload clusters.
The following host, storage, and networking considerations specifically apply to the design of a dedicated management infrastructure:
• Do not employ vSphere Auto Deploy or boot from SAN in the management environment. Avoid having the tools and services that are used to manage these components running on this same management platform, creating a circle of dependency.
• Avoid booting from local disks. This makes them unavailable for use in a vSAN disk group.
• Provide a highly available vSphere cluster configuration with redundancy at each component layer.
• Provide high availability of virtual and physical network management switching.
Figure 21. Highly Available Cloud Platform Management Cluster (Logical Architecture)
