BLOG: IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center for IBM Z and LinuxONE

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Infrastructure as a Service platform to easily deploy and maintain virtual servers in a z/VM or KVM environment

IBM recently announced a new release of IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center (ICIC) with many new features including enhancements around onboarding existing virtual machines and deploying Red Hat Core OS guests running under z/VM to enable easier implementation of Red Hat OpenShift to build on premise cloud environments. ICIC has been available for a couple of years now and has made steady improvements with each new release.

Both z/VM and KVM have various native methods to deploy new virtual machines. But these methods are mainly aimed at the system administrator and require knowledge and skills with the underlying infrastructure to deploy new virtual machines. These methods are basic and don’t provide for an easy way to allow non administrators to deploy new workloads. As companies move to take advantage of modern development and deployment methods, especially around deploying cloud-based solutions, it requires that the infrastructure is flexible and automated to a greater extent than what is traditionally seen on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE. ICIC enables you to set up a self-provisioning environment allowing developers and operations personnel to easily create and maintain various virtual machines under z/VM or KVM. Administrators can utilize ICIC to securely and efficiently manage users and resources.

ICIC is an infrastructure as a service platform based on OpenStack. ICIC utilizes a management and compute node model based on Linux virtual machines running under z/VM or KVM. ICIC is designed to provide an IaaS environment that is familiar to any administrator that utilizes any other OpenStack based IaaS solution. Along with providing management and automation of compute, storage and network resources, ICIC can integrate into other cloud solutions to provide chargeback capabilities through OpenStack API’s.

With standard OpenStack API’s ICIC can be incorporated into other infrastructure management solutions such as IBM Cloud Automation Manager, VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestration, Red Hat CloudForms, and Terraform.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center 1.1.4 runs on any z13, z14 or z15 and all LinuxONE I, II, and III models with a z/VM 7.1 or 7.2 hypervisor or a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based KVM hypervisor running at an 8.2 or 8.4 level. The management and compute nodes used to manage the ICIC environment require RHEL 8.2 or 8.4 running under either z/VM and KVM.

Virtual machines deployed under z/VM can be RHEL 7.7 through 8.4, RHCOS 4.6 through 4.8, SLES 15 SP1 or SP2 and Ubuntu 20.04.

Virtual machines deployed under RHEL KVM can be RHEL 7.8 through 8.4 or RHCOS 4.7 and 4.8.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center enables developers and operations staff to easily deploy new workloads without having to learn new skills. ICIC provides a modern way to self-provision new workloads that is secure and can easily be managed and maintained through the entire life cycle of these workloads. As we move towards a more automated and in many cases a more complex infrastructure environment ICIC gives you the tools you need to make deploying and managing virtual machines under z/VM and KVM easy.

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As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, Mainline has extensive experience with IBM mainframe systems and operating systems, and we can help you with Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible, IBM Cloud Pak, z/OS, z/VM, Linux on IBM Z, and LinuxONE platforms. To set up an in-depth discussion about how to get started using these technologies, please contact your Mainline Account Executive directly or click here to contact us with any questions.