If you’re using or even considering moving some of your workloads to Power Virtual Server, you’ve already done some of the important work of planning to modernize your infrastructure. Power Virtual Server, as you know, can be a replacement for your on-prem systems or offer a compelling path forward to a hybrid architecture. You can configure Power Virtual Server infrastructure to work together with IBM Cloud offerings to integrate mixed-architecture workloads using new PER rollouts in many of our datacenters – as well create an OpenShift cluster running on Power Virtual Server hardware that works hand-in-hand with some of IBM Cloud’s foundational features. There are countless ways in which you can run your software using IBM Cloud, Power Virtual Server, and your own on-prem hardware.
Drilling down first to the OpenShift Platform piece of the puzzle – we’ll jumpstart your cluster by using the Installer-Provisioned Infrastructure installation. There are several great resources on what IPI is and how to configure both your IBM Cloud account and the install environment over in our Dev ExChange area.
(Side note: If you haven’t subscribed to the OpenShift and Kubernetes blogs yet, spend some time getting to know the Dev ExChange. It’s a fantastic resource for getting quick answers to your technical questions.)
I would recommend you start with this intro I wrote back in 2023, https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/awb-deploy-ocp-on-power-vs-ipi , then move on to the more domain-specific tutorials written by our development team.
You can be up and running with one of the most feature-rich and flexible enterprise platforms on the market in a matter of hours.
After you’ve mastered OpenShift, you can start to think about connecting workloads running in your cluster in Power Virtual Server with those you may have running in IBM Cloud. The Power Virtual Server provider built into the OpenShift installer can either create an IBM Cloud VPC for you, or you can “bring your own” VPC and have the installer use it. That VPC is connected via a transit gateway to Power Virtual Server -- and is a small but powerful mechanism that allows you to marry two worlds.
Your next adventure will be to plan the next phase of your modernization journey. With IPI-driven OpenShift, you’re just getting started.