IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.6 Enhancements

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.6 benefits include backup and restore, hybrid hypervisor support, and user experience improvements

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.6 enhancements include support for the following:

• A snapshot for multiple disks at the same time on IBM z/VM and Red Hat KVM
• Visualization of the network topology with the UI
• Backup and restore of Red Hat KVM VMes with Spectrum Scale
• The ability to manage the FCP devices lifecycle with fine granularity on z/VM
• The ability to manage the access control (security group) of a Red Hat KVM-based VM
• Hybrid hypervisor support for z/VM and Red Hat KVM

Many IT organizations have turned to the agility of hybrid cloud solutions to facilitate their digital transformation journeys for all types of noncontainerized and containerized workloads.

With Cloud Infrastructure Center, Big Blue provides an infrastructure management solution in support of IaaS cloud computing on its zSystems and LinuxONE platforms. IaaS delivers the fundamental compute, network, and storage resources to users on-demand and enables to-scale resources on an as-needed basis.

Cloud Infrastructure Center meets the demands of a hybrid cloud approach, helping with automation capabilities and an easy integration into an enterprise hybrid cloud. It is based on industry standards and leverages common skills for cloud management.

Cloud Infrastructure Center provides a ready-to-use solution for the following:

• Management of the cloud infrastructure, including on-premises deployments of z/VM and Red Hat KVM-based Linux VMs on zSystems and LinuxONE
• Deployment of images of multiple Linux OSs for noncontainerized workloads from IBM, open source, or other ISV software
• Aid in simplifying and automating Red Hat OpenShift cluster deployments
  Integration with enterprise cloud management tools to provision and orchestrate cloud workloads, using OpenStack-compatible APIs

Based on these capabilities, Cloud Infrastructure Center shows the following adoption patterns in the market:

• Deployment of on-premises database-as-a-service Administrators can build an image that consists of a Linux distribution and a database, for example, MongoDB, and can be deployed as-a-service at scale by users.
• Support to help simplify and automate Red Hat OpenShift cluster deployments A Red Hat OpenShift image can be deployed into a virtual machine that is based on z/VM or Red Hat KVM, as every other image. Support a simplified and automated Red Hat OpenShift cluster deployment in a user-provisioned infrastructure model through Red Hat Ansible or Terraform.
• IaaS management for service providers Cloud Infrastructure Center can serve as the management system for the virtualized infrastructure to support different cloud computing models. The built-in OpenStack-compatible APIs satisfy a range of infrastructure management demands and can integrate various components to automate infrastructure services and thereby help reduce cost and complexity. Cloud Infrastructure Center, integrated with the IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, enables recording the consumed resource allocations of the virtual machines.
• Simplified experience with virtualization on zSystems and LinuxONE

The capabilities for infrastructure management, automated deployment, and integration of zSystems and LinuxONE based infrastructure into cloud computing are based on the industry standard and vendor-agnostic technology for IaaS management, apply to noncontainerized and containerized environments, and deliver a major step into simple infrastructure management.

Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.6 further enhances the existing solution capabilities
It is designed to require little or no training for users to manage the virtual infrastructure. It has the same usage and skill requirements as similar IaaS offerings on other platforms. Cloud administrators who integrate zSystems and LinuxONE into an enterprise hybrid cloud approach do not need to possess specific zSystems or LinuxONE skills.

Key requirements

• Requires a zSystems or a LinuxONE server.
• Can be used as a host environment on z/VM or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based KVM.

Planned availability date: November 11, 2022