IT organizations globally have turned to the agility of infrastructure as a service to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, seamlessly supporting both non-containerized and containerized workloads. They are shifting workloads to a computing model that integrates on-premises infrastructure with private and public cloud computing models.

IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center is the on-premises infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform on IBM Z® and IBM® LinuxONE, designed to address the following key challenges  Lifecycle management of the virtual infrastructure Automated infrastructure services for users via self-service portal Integration of IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE based infrastructure into enterprise computing

Cloud Infrastructure Center provides a consistent user experience to any administrator and user to create and manage a unified, enterprise-wide infrastructure that drives business agility and innovation.

To find out what the most used user scenarios are, see the IBM Whitepaper: Empower how you deploy, manage, and integrate infrastructure as a service.

The new Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.3 is focusing to further improve the operational efficiency and the user experience.

Highlighting a few new capabilities regarding operational efficiency:

• First, to provide more flexibility in managing resources across multiple data centers, Cloud Infrastructure Center provides the option to decentralize resource management to the local data center level. This allows each data center to be managed independently, tailored to its unique needs.
• Second, to optimize the use of CPUs and memory, Cloud Infrastructure Center utilizes the capabilities of IBM z/VM® directory management for CPU and memory. This enables better handling of these resources, leading to improved utilization and efficiency.
• Third, resize and and live relocate (LGR) on-boarded virtual machines (VM's) that were not created by Cloud Infrastructure Center, expanding Day 2 operations for on-boarded VMs.
  

With IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.3, the following features are available to benefit from:

• Redefine Control Pane: Optimize compute node assignment
  • Ability to split the compute node of an existing cluster to compute nodes of multiple clusters for better admin experience
• Utilize the capability of z/VM directory management regarding CPU sharing and max memory setting
  • Optimize CPU and memory resource handling for z/VM-based VMs
• Live resize and Live Guest Relocation (LGR) for onboard VM’s
  • Resize and LGR of VM’s that have been created outside and on-boarded to Cloud Infrastructure Center
• Rebuild z/VM Boot from Volume (BFV) VMs
  • Rebuild existing z/VM VMs with new image via CLI without manual effort
• GPFS support enhancement
  • Enhanced error log
• Diagnostic Tool enhancement
  • Reduce ssh connections to compute node
• Cinder High Availability enhancement
  • Notify user if fail-over node not configured
• Additional Guest OS support for: Canonical Ubuntu 24.04, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS 4.16 and 4.17

All feature descriptions of IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.3 are available at What’s new with 1.2.3.

Check as well the IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center page for more production information.