Ron Gordon
Director – Power Systems
IBM recently announced changes to Cloud infrastructure on Power Systems. PowerVC, which is an OpenStack implementation optimized to Power Systems KVM and PowerVM, has a new release designated 1.3, with enhancements in dynamic resource optimization, storage support, security, and VM restart capabilities. Changes also come with the withdrawal of Cloud Manager with Open Stack, as well as a new direction for IBM Cloud Orchestrator and the announcement of PowerVC Manager.
PowerVC Manager is basically a replacement of IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack, and provides the self-service portal that is not in PowerVC. PowerVC Manager will be part of AIX Enterprise Edition, and contains PowerVC, as it is a single product install for provisioning and self-service. Besides the portal, PowerVC Manager contains policy improvements over ICMOS, as well as metering for billing and accounting purposes. At this time, PowerVC Manager will only manage the stack with PowerVM. PowerKVM users should use PowerVC, and can continue with ICMOS until PowerVC Manager support is enabled.
While PowerVC and PowerVC Manager are for Power Systems private clouds (aka automated provisioning), IBM Cloud Orchestrator supports hybrid heterogeneous clouds, and provides higher levels of business process management, extending a common portal beyond Power Systems to include both x86 and System z. In the future, IBM Cloud Orchestrator will not contain an internal version of OpenStack, but rather will interface to OpenStack implementations like PowerVC or community OpenStack versions.
As there are more details about the IBM announcements, please contact Mainline for a deeper look at these solutions.