Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE - Group home

Along with cloud computing, which has evolved to be the standard use model, the IT infrastructure continues to be the foundation for every IT service. To realize the benefits of cloud computing, the infrastructure must not only deliver availability, reliability, security, and performance, but also must be easily manageable as a service.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center has been available in the market for about one year now, providing advanced IaaS management, including on-premises cloud deployments of Linux virtual machines (VM) on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE. It is part of IBM’s hybrid and multicloud solution portfolio, helping to transform client applications and infrastructure into a hybrid multicloud.

Our clients had been looking for a simplified IaaS management for Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE, and therefore it is not surprising that they described the value of Cloud Infrastructure Center with statements like the following: “Provides us the foundation to automate provisioning of VMs” or “Maintains the inventory of all VMs and assigned resources (CPU, memory, storage, network)”.

That matched with our goals for Cloud Infrastructure Center - to provide a ready-to-use solution with a consistent, industry-standard user experience to define, instantiate, discover, and manage the lifecycle of virtual infrastructure. This includes easy provisioning of virtual machine instances based on z/VM or RHEL-based KVM into an on-premises cloud using either a self-service portal that includes network and storage bindings or, optionally, image deployment or automated deployment using Terraform, CloudForms, or Ansible.With its built-in OpenStack-compatible APIs, Cloud Infrastructure Center is based on the industry standard for vendor-agnostic IaaS management, enabling an easy integration to higher-level cloud automation tools, such as IBM Cloud Automation Manager, VMware vRealize Automation, and vRealize Orchestrator.

And now, Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.2 is available, supporting the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS 4.3 (or later) as guest operating system instances for z/VM. This enables the deployment of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform manager and worker nodes to be largely automated, the base for the usage of the existing and future IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

This fit very well with another client feedback we received, that like the simplifies virtual machine lifecycle management with a single pane of glass with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and containers.

The new version provides additional enhancements, including for the first time cloud deployments for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). In addition, IBM System Storage DS8000 is supported through Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) as persistent storage with guests on IBM z/VM, and per-engine pricing is available as an additional pricing metric, beside the per virtual server pricing. Support is also provided for additional Linux distribution as guests on z/VM, including Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical Ubuntu Linux.

For more information see the Cloud Infrastructure Center data sheet, and for more technical information see the blog Create a virtual machine in IBM Cloud Infrastruture Center by Terraform.