  Due to the huge surge in the traffic of IoT devices and applications, mobile
networks require a new paradigm shift to handle such demand roll out. With the
5G economics, those networks should provide virtualized multi-vendor and
intelligent systems that can scale and efficiently optimize the investment of
the underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the market stakeholders have proposed
the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) as one of the solutions to improve the
network performance, agility, and time-to-market of new applications. O-RAN
harnesses the power of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and new
network technologies (NFV and SDN) to allow operators to manage their
infrastructure in a cost-efficient manner. Therefore, it is necessary to
address the O-RAN performance and availability challenges autonomously while
maintaining the quality of service. In this work, we propose an optimized
deployment strategy for the virtualized O-RAN units in the O-Cloud to minimize
the network's outage while complying with the performance and operational
requirements. The model's evaluation provides an optimal deployment strategy
that maximizes the network's overall availability and adheres to the
O-RAN-specific requirements.
