VMware updated automation and assurance functions of its Telco Cloud Platform and added new features targeting 5G deployment models. The moves take advantage of commercial progress the vendor has accrued with established operators like Dish Network.

The updates begin with VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform RAN hitting its 2.0 status. This comes with gaining VMware’s Bare Metal Automation service and access to VMware’s ESXi hypervisor. The former allows operators to use zero-touch provisioning and lifecycle management on top of a bare metal deployment, while the latter adds hypervisor management.

Stephen Spellicy, VP of service provider marketing, enablement and business development at VMware, explained in an interview this goes “down the stack” and does not just focus on VMware platforms.

“This is really relevant specifically to the RAN where you've got operators out there who don't have enough staff, and they don't want to do truck rolls, and they want to be able to do basically lights-out provisioning, zero-touch provisioning, and they also want to be able to do ongoing (day-two) management,” Spellicy said.

Misbah Mahmoodi, senior director of product marketing at VMware, added that the migration of that hypervisor control down to bare metal does not impact performance, or enact the so-called “hypervisor tax.” He noted that VMware has run third-party tests showing “the performance of hypervisor with ESXi is actually equivalent to bare metal,” which were tied to optimization of VMware Photon operating system running within the ESXi hypervisor.

“Once you have that then you tack on all the other value add that a hypervisor offers to you, so things around multitenancy, things around security performance, all of those are key capabilities that [are] offered just on the hypervisor that you cannot just get with bare metal,” Mahmoodi said, adding that the vendor would be releasing details of those tests in the coming weeks.

The Cloud Platform also gains recent updates to VMware’s Telco Cloud Automation 2.1. These include support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) that allow for provisioning of cloud-native functions directly on native Amazon EKS.

The Telco Cloud Platform 5G now offers the automation platform’s ability to support virtual network function (VNF) and CNF onboarding, instantiation, and lifecycle management, with access to more than 275 certified VNFs and CNFs. The automation addition also allows platform users to upgrade control plane and worker node pools separately and provides intrusion protection for 5G networks from east-west traffic attacks.

VMware further advanced its radio access network intelligence controller (RIC) roll, adding Viavi Solutions to provide a testing framework. Spellicy said this will help operators to “fast track their experimentation and future deployment and do that with confidence.”

The RIC and associated xApps are gaining interest among communities supporting the development of open RAN, including the Open Networking Foundation’s SD-RAN project. xApps allow operators to design and control the most important RAN functions, providing administrative RAN sovereignty over functions that are typically implemented as proprietary features on base stations.

VMware’s Telco Cloud Service Assurance platform also hits 2.0, gaining access to new mobile service use cases like container-as-a-service (CaaS), 4G and 5G mobile cores, network slicing, and RAN. The assurance product was formerly VMware’s Telco Cloud Operations platform that the vendor acquired from Dell Technologies in mid-2018.

VMware initially rolled out its overarching Telco Cloud Platform last year, which itself was an expansion of its reorganized and repacked stack of technologies for network operators. That initial work also came under VMware’s previous owner Dell Technologies, and prior to the more recent acquisition attempt by Broadcom.

The latest updates also glean insight from VMware’s ongoing carrier deployment work, including considerable experience from the ongoing Dish Network 5G deployment. The carrier managed to hit an initial deadline in June, with an upcoming deadline to cover 70% of the U.S. population with a 5G signal next year.

“We definitely have had our learnings with Dish and the scale and the speed at which they are looking to deploy,” Mahmoodi said. “We're taking a lot of that feedback and putting it back into the product, in terms of what needs to be done from an optimization perspective.”

Mahmoodi specifically cited templating and customization, two pain points that others have touched on.

“We have this thing called dynamic infrastructure policies, which really does look at some of the base configurations and the base settings of what the network needs to be for this specific [distributed unit], and once we have templatized it, then we are able to bake that into the product itself,” Mahmoodi said. “And these templates are already there so that when we go to the next deployment, these templates are basically baked in, they can use those templates and they really will help them from an acceleration of their deployment.”

Mahmoodi added that VMware is taking those learnings into discussions with operators in Europe and South America.

“It's been really, I would say for both parties, for Dish, for VMware, and the other ecosystem partners, a really great learning experience,” he said.

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