What Cloud Provisioning is

Using the Cloud Provisioning tasks, you can perform software provisioning for IBM Cloud Provisioning and Management for z/OS. This work includes creating instances of IBM® middleware, such as IBM CICS®), IBM DB2®, IBM Information Management System (IMS™), IBM MQ, and IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS), and creating middleware resources, such as MQ queues, CICS regions, and DB2 databases.

With the Cloud Provisioning tasks, users:
  • Define the cloud domain, administrators for the domain, and classes of users (tenants) for the domain.
  • Prepare software services templates that provision z/OS® software. Service providers add templates, associate tenants with the templates, create resource pools for the templates, test the templates, then publish them to make them available for consumers.
  • Provision software from templates, creating software services instances.
  • Manage software services instances.

For information about using the Cloud Provisioning tasks, see the online help that ships with z/OSMF. The z/OSMF online help is also available in IBM Knowledge Center at: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSLTBW_2.2.0/com.ibm.zos.v2r2.izu/izu.htm

The basic procedure for provisioning software is:
  1. Define domains and tenants.
  2. Create a template, specifying the workflow, action and variables files that were provided by the software vendor.

    The template is added to the software services catalog.

  3. Add the template to a tenant.
  4. Modify the template as needed.
  5. Approve any approval records. Approval records are created when a workflow or action definition file contains an element that identifies a user ID under which a workflow step or action is to be performed (a runAsUser ID). They can also be defined for the template in general, and for a domain.
  6. Test the template and ensure that it successfully creates an instance, that is, that it provisions the software and that the actions defined for the instance perform as expected.
  7. Publish the template to make it available to consumers.
  8. Run the template to create a software instance.
Parent topic: Preparing to use Cloud Provisioning