Architecture overview

IBM® Wazi Image Builder enables enterprises to extract their on-premise IBM Z® platforms and deploy it as a custom image through API or web-based graphical interface for use within the IBM Cloud® Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure. Wazi Image Builder can be installed on an x86_64 Linux® system hosted either in a cloud or an on-premise physical or virtual machine.

Wazi Image Builder provides the following features:
  • An application development and testing environment that can improve development infrastructure availability and flexibility.
  • Current® levels of IBM z/OS® software that give access to new runtime capabilities for development and testing for enterprises.
  • Mixed workload support for enterprises, which can help reduce the development costs.
  • An approachable and portable environment for education on Z for enterprises.
  • A web-based interface to extract, manage, and deploy the images from existing Z packages.
  • Creating and managing images from various sources.
  • Deploying images for developers and testers in a self-service automated way.
  • Monitoring the status and availability of all created assets and target environments.

Source environments

Wazi Image Builder can work with your source environments to extract and deploy the necessary volumes to target environments. The following source environment types are supported:
Genuine z/OS on IBM Z
ZD&T z/OS Extraction Utilities must be installed and configured on such a source environment to extract z/OS artifacts.
Existing z/OS instances
ZD&T z/OS Extraction Utilities must be installed and configured on such a source environment to extract z/OS artifacts.

You can specify and configure source environments on the web server. For more information, see Adding source environments.

ZD&T z/OS Extraction Utilities

ZD&T z/OS Extraction Utilities is required if you want to create components from IBM Z platforms, either the physical or emulated IBM Z platforms. It needs to be installed on one or more IBM Z platforms to allow Wazi Image Builder to use the IBM Z platforms as source environments to extract z/OS resources. For more information, see Installing ZD&T z/OS Extraction Utilities.

Target environments

A target environment is a IBM Cloud VPC environment, where you can deploy extracted z/OS artifacts as a custom image, which can then be used to enable a cloud native development and test experience for z/OS.

Web server

Wazi Image Builder web server enables users to use the browser to extract artifacts such as volumes, and transfer the artifacts to the storage server. Then, you can deploy the custom images to your target environment.

The web server provides the following features:
  • Integrating with company LDAP account to enable administrators to set up accounts with minimum efforts.
  • Scheduling the extraction or deployment for another date or time that you want.
  • Flexible functions to select required volumes from the source machine, and transfer the volumes to the target machine.

For more information, see Installing Wazi Image Builder.

Storage server

Wazi Image Builder stores extracted information on the intermediary storage machine, for example, SFTP server. Extracted information is never deleted from the storage server until the information is manually deleted. You need to prepare such a storage server and ensure enough storage on the storage server to hold the required artifacts.

Note: The web server and storage server can be configured on the same machine. If you want to use one machine, you need to have large storage on the machine.