Cisco Ultra-M platform for T-Mobile 5G PCF PCRF

Question 1

What is M5?

Answer 1

M5 is a Cisco blade server. It is the hardware platform that the current T-Mobile 5G PCF and 4G PCRF run on. The previous version of the 4G PCRF ran on M4 blades.

Question 2

What is Cisco Ultra-M?

Answer 2

Ultra M is a turnkey virtual solution that consists of Cisco® mobility software, Cisco general-purpose compute hardware, and various OpenStack components that support the ability to orchestrate and manage the virtual network functions (VNF) as a core network element.

Question 3

Name the functional elements of Ultra-M.

Answer 3

Staging Server
OpenStack Platform Director (OSPD)
OpenStack Controllers (OSC)
Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC)
Docker
Kubernetes (k8s)

Question 4

Ultra-M Staging Server

Answer 4

Onboard the Ultra Services Platform (USP) packages and the automation stack and also hosts the UAS (Ultra Automation Server) modules

Question 5

Ultra-M OpenStack Platform Director (OSPD)

Answer 5

Serves as the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) as well as the deployment server for the Overcloud. OpenStack functionality is provided from RedHat OSP 13 (OpenStack Platform Release 13: Latest)
• Serves offline container registry
• Serves offline RPM repository

Question 6

Ultra-M OpenStack Controllers (OSC)

Answer 6

These are three servers in HA pacemaker cluster. They handle the processing of overcloud, and other critical Openstack services. The OSC utilizes three controllers running in containers to provide VIM layer redundancy and upgradability. The three Openstack Controllers are deployed on UCS C220 M5 Baremetal servers.

Question 7

Ultra-M Cisco Elastic Services Controller (ESC)

Answer 7

Serves as the Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM). ESC is the VM Orchestrator and handles all VM deployment as well as undeployment.

Question 8

Ultra-M Docker

Answer 8

The Ultra-M Solution uses the Docker Hub framework to provide an integrated container-native solution to be utilized by the Kubernetes Cloud.

Question 9

Ultra-M Kubernetes (k8s)

Answer 9

Kubernetes serves as the basis for the Cloud-Native platform in conjunction with Docker. Kubernetes is responsible for the internal networking, internal IP assignment, service deployment, and more.