What’s new for IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager V3.2.0?
We are very pleased to announce the release of IBM Cloud Private V3.2.0! With IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager, you can enable your enterprise to make the journey to cloud and manage your multicloud and multicluster environments securely, without any service disturbance to your customers.
IBM Cloud Private is available in a community edition and a fully supported enterprise edition. The community edition is available at no charge from Docker Hub. The enterprise edition supports high availability topologies and includes commercial support from IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and the IBM Cloud Private management platform.
Note: IBM Cloud Private-CE is limited for non-production environment usage only and does not support HA clusters.
If you want to try IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager, you can use either the hosted trial, the tutorial, or the self-guided demo. You can also try the free community edition. For details, see Get started with IBM Cloud Private.
To purchase IBM Cloud Private so that you can download it from IBM Passport Advantage, contact your IBM sales representative at 1-844-952-5683, priority code: Cloud.
What’s new for IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager V3.2.0?
IBM Cloud Private top features and enhancements
Reduced footprint and customizable installation
To reduce the footprint of IBM Cloud Private on your platform, during installation and afterward, you can disable management services. After installation, if you require any disabled services, you can enable them.
Multi-tenancy logging support
You can install more than one instance of the logging chart with security enabled to prevent unauthenticated access and to restrict access based on namespace access. Extra instances enable secure operation for many scenarios, including multi-tenancy.
With IBM Cloud Private V3.2.0, you can still install multiple instances of the logging chart with the following security enabled:
- Allow blocking direct access to Elasticsearch. Only requests from ELK Stack components such as Logstash and Kibana are allowed.
- Allow requiring IBM Cloud Private login before you access Kibana.
- Allow requiring namespace access before you access Kibana.
- Add IBM Cloud Private console navigation links to additional logging instances, while team membership is required to see the links.
Enhanced certificate management and governance
You can replace the root CA certificate and refresh and restore the certificates that are created by the installer and used by platform services in your IBM Cloud Private environment. The root CA certificate is now stored within the `ibmcloud-cluster-ca-cert` secret in the kube-public namespace. The certificate can be imported into your client truststores to access IBM Cloud Private Platform APIs.
You can view the Certificates, Issuers, and ClusterIssuers in your cluster, including information on certificate age and expiration. You can manually refresh cert-manager certificates and automatically restart pods by using these certificates.
Deploying Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11 in high availability mode
You can now configure high availability for an IBM Cloud Private with Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11 cluster by deploying IBM Cloud Private on dedicated Red Hat OpenShift nodes. In the config.yaml file during installation, you can specify the dedicated Red Hat OpenShift nodes for the master, proxy, and management cluster nodes that deploy the IBM Cloud Private components as Red Hat OpenShift workloads.
You can install IBM Cloud Private with Red Hat OpenShift by using the IBM Cloud Private installer. Installation can be completed in four main steps:
- Configure the boot node
- Configure your cluster
- Run the IBM Cloud Private installer
- Post installation tasks
IBM Multicloud Manager top features and enhancements
IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager integration
IBM Multicloud Manager is now integrated into IBM Cloud Private. With this integration, you can now configure IBM Multicloud Manager during or after IBM Cloud Private installation. Additionally, you can manage multiple clusters by importing them by using the IBM Cloud Private CLI.
With the new IBM Cloud Private CLI `cloudctl mc cluster import` command, you can import clusters from different Kubernetes cloud providers, including IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift clusters. After import, the targeted cluster becomes a managed-cluster for the IBM Multicloud Manager hub-cluster.
Improved performance
In the management console, you can seamlessly use the Catalog in both IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager as a single control plane to manage deployed workloads on local and remote clusters. The name of the cluster that you are working with is now visible in the dashboard header so you know where the actions will take place.
Search is now available for both IBM Cloud Private and IBM Multicloud Manager. You can search for Kubernetes resources on any cluster and filter your search by the resource fields. Search results are based off of your cluster objects. For example, you can search by created (how recently the object was created) or cluster (which cluster an object is on).
You can now deploy Helm charts to remote namespaces. By leveraging IBM Multicloud Manager, you can deploy Helm charts to namespaces that are on remote clusters and namespaces that are on your hub-cluster.
Incident integration with operational tools: Event Management for IBM Multicloud Manager
With IBM Multicloud Manager, you can ensure that your IBM Cloud Private clusters are secure, operating efficiently, and delivering the service levels that applications expect.
You can visualize and manage multiple clusters when you install Event Management for IBM Multicloud Manager. By using Event Management, you can consolidate information from your monitoring systems and address problems in your clusters. Events indicate that something happened on an application, service, or another monitored object. All events that are related to a single application or to a particular cluster are correlated with an incident. Event Management can receive events from various monitoring sources, either on-premises or in the cloud.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Private version 3.2.0
For full details of everything that is new or has changed for IBM Cloud Private version 3.2.0, see the IBM Knowledge Center.