IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 became available today. The new enhancements are helping to improve the availability and resiliency to meet the demands of hybrid cloud with IBM Z® or IBM® LinuxONE. This blog focuses on two of the multiple enhancements, high availability of management nodes and Layer 3 network support.
High availability of management nodes
With Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 it is possible to install or upgrade to a three-management node cluster, intended to increase the business resiliency during expected and unexpected outages. A three-management node cluster prevents from a single point of failure and enables to distribute the workload across multiple nodes for a more scaled deployment.
In support of this functionality, the Cloud Infrastructure Center operation manager was added, an administration tool, helping with the install/uninstall of an IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center cluster, and recovery related topics, such as node replacement, backup & restore, and more.
In the high availability cluster, it could happen that cluster nodes diverge from each other, for example caused by a temporary network outage affecting the communication paths between the cluster nodes – this is called the brain split problem. Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 solves that problem by leveraging a fence agent. The admin can manage, operate, and check the status of the management nodes in the cluster view, consistent with the current user experience.
Layer 3 network support
Layer 3 network support of a Red Hat KVM-based software defined network is helping to achieve greater flexibility and enhanced security through workload isolation for multiple projects and tenants. It can be compared with a ‘virtual private network’ implementation on IBM Z or IBM® LinuxONE.
With the Layer 3 support, one or multiple tenant networks can be defined in a project. Virtual routers can be defined in Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 to connect multiple tenant networks in a project, and to the outside world. If needed, floating IP can be used to connect to a virtual machine, and if the inbound and outbound packets have to go to a firewall, Cloud Infrastructure Center is supporting that as well by defining statical routing.
As well, the Network Topology view in Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 can visualize the enhanced network capabilities going along with the Layer 3 network support.
And there is more
And there is more in Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0: multiple FLAT network support is enabling to define multiple NICs on one virtual machine to guarantee various network connectivity, iothreads can be defined on virtual machines that are based on RHEL KVM, and 2-factor authentication for enhanced security at login. See as well: How to use Backup and Restore in the IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.2.0 standalone deployment environment
For more information see: IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center