Overview

Capabilities and values

IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center is an advanced infrastructure management offering, including on-premises cloud deployments of IBM z/VM®-based and KVM 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.

  • Manage existed virtual machines that aren't created by compute node with onboarding feature (z/VM only).

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.

IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center provides industry-standard openstack compatible APIs, by using the APIs, it's eligible to integrate IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center with other IaaS or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions which provides openstack integration points. For additional information, refer to integration.

Architecture overview on z/VM

Figure 1. IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center Architecture on z/VM
IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center Architecture on z/VM

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.

Architecture overview on KVM

Figure 2. IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center Architecture on KVM
IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center Architecture on KVM

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 KVM, one compute node is required.