Overview

IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center is an advanced infrastructure management offering, including on-premises cloud deployments of IBM z/VM®-based Linux® virtual machines on the IBM Z® and IBM LinuxONE platforms.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center delivers the following capabilities:

Easy provisioning of virtual machine instances into an on-premises cloud via a self-service portal.
Infrastructure provisioning that can be confined by workflow-driven policies.
Automated configuration of I/O and network resources.
Image management that includes virtual machine image capture, catalog, and deployment.
Easy integration into higher-level cloud automation and orchestration tools.
Federation of an on-premises cloud with OpenStack clouds via OpenStack compatible APIs establishing a multi-region cloud.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center is an industry-proven turn-key Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution that provides a consistent, industry-standard user experience to define, instantiate, and manage the lifecycle of virtual infrastructure, deployment of images (operating system and applications), and policies to maximize resource utilization.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center is designed to require no specific platform skills from the user and minimal platform skills from the administrator to accelerate cloud deployments.

Architecture overview

Figure 1. IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center Architecture

From the architecture picture:

For one cloud, only one management node needs to be set up and it manages all the compute nodes.
For each to-be-managed z/VM, one compute node is required.
The management node can locate at the same z/VM with the compute node but they must be on different Linux machines.