Hybrid cloud

One of the features in IBM® Cloud Manager with OpenStack is the ability to create a hybrid cloud with IBM Cloud OpenStack Services. The hybrid cloud consists of an off-premises region that is created by IBM Cloud OpenStack Services at your request, and an on-premises region that you create. Optionally use the new IBM Cloud Manager - Deployer user interface to deploy your on-premises cloud.

To deploy a hybrid cloud, you need to first contact your IBM Cloud OpenStack Services team. In this environment, IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack runs in your on-premises data center and is integrated with your IBM Cloud OpenStack Services cloud. These two regions share a common Keystone that runs in IBM Cloud OpenStack Services.

After your hybrid cloud is configured, you can manage and deploy virtual machine instances to both regions by using your on-premises dashboard. Virtual machine instances that are created in the on-premises and off-premises regions can communicate with each other. Since Keystone is shared, you need to manage only one set of users for both regions.

This image shows the hybrid environment. Power Systems, x86 Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) or QEMU machines are supported. In this example, you need to have a minimum of three x86 RHEL machines. One machine is the deployment server where IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack 4.3 is installed. One machine is used as the OpenStack controller and the other machine is used as a compute node where your virtual machine instances run. For more information about the minimum hardware requirements, see Planning for IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack.