Virtualized control plane (VCP) consists of the services required to manage workloads and respond to API calls. VCP is the heart and brain of your OpenStack deployment that controls all logic responsible for managing OpenStack-based virtual infrastructure and provide the OpenStack cloud capabilities.
For the sake of clarity, we split the OpenStack VCP services into the core and extension services.
The OpenStack VCP core services are dealing with the virtual infrastructure
resources, sush as virtual machines, images, networks, and
so on. From the layout standpoint, one instance of each
core service runs in the combined control plane virtual node called
ctl in terms of the metadata model.
The OpenStack VCP extension services enable management of the resources consumed by the workloads indrectly, such as DNS names, virtual load balancers, and so on. Unlike the core services, the extensions typically run on the dedicated virtual nodes. See the Control plane virtual machines for details.
Note
Core and extension services are considered mandatory in the Mirantis OpenStack reference architecture.