Cloud Tools and Solutions for IBM i

Your cloud tools choices for IBM i

Many IBM i customers are looking at cloud options today. As one of the most important platforms that run the core businesses around the world, IBM i provides different products and tools to make the customers cloud ready at infrastructure level. These products and tools cover the cases such as managing the IBM i virtual machine life cycle, automating OS management and configuration, monitoring the system and application matrix, orchestration cloud tasks, and so on.

Virtualization and cloud management – PowerVC for IBM i

PowerVC offers advanced virtualization and cloud management capabilities for IBM i, AIX and Linux running on Power systems. The life cycle of IBM i virtual machines can be fully managed by PowerVC, such as deploying new instances, capture images, remotely restarted the VMs, etc. Such capabilities help the users to simplify the VM management and improve the efficiency by fast deployment. Furthermore, IBM i virtual machines managed by PowerVC can be easily migrated to IBM Cloud which gives users the opportunity to start trying out private cloud built upon PowerVC and then move to the public cloud later.

PowerVC can be integrated with multi-cloud environment via higher level cloud orchestrator tools. IBM i as one of the supported platforms, it can be managed by the tools that integrate with PowerVC. For example, Terraform could operate and manage the lifecycle of IBM i virtual machines through PowerVC, and thus many cloud providers and solutions such as IBM Cloud Automation Manager can orchestrate tasks built upon IBM i instances.

To support PowerVC, IBM i has several functions built into operating system. Many of such functions are in Cloud-Init which is used to initialize the instance after the virtual machine deployment. Cloud-Init customizes IBM i instances and provides the ability to accept user scripts as input. This helps some level of application initialization as well.

For detail information about PowerVC and Cloud-Init for IBM i, please refer to the following link.

PowerVC for IBM i - Virtualization management

Cloud automation and management

The enterprise operating systems running on Power Systems started to officially support Ansible since 1H 2020. Ansible is the tool to help on task automation, application deployment, configuration management and so on. It provides orchestration capability that complex tasks can be sequenced and grouped to run on particular systems or devices known as endpoints.

IBM i now has over 35 modules and plugins available in both Ansible Galaxy and Automation Platform. The modules and plugins supporting IBM i are open sourced so that everything could be found in their GitHub repository. These modules and plugins allow the users to run tasks against native IBM i environment and PASE. The user could choose to run CL and SQL commands directly through IBM i modules, or to look for available modules that deal with specific tasks. IBM i customers now could leverage Ansible to automate tasks in the hybrid cloud environment.

For more details about Ansible for IBM i, please visit below links:

Ansible for IBM i GitHub repository: https://github.com/IBM/ansible-for-i

IBM i collections in Ansible Galaxy: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ibm/power_ibmi

Ansible for IBM i documentation: https://ibm.github.io/ansible-for-i/index.html

Ansible for IBM i support - Cloud automation

Cloud Monitoring

There are many options for IBM i monitoring. However, if there is requirement to monitor multiple IBM i systems, Nagios plugin support for IBM i does perfectly fit. Nagios is the tool to monitor IT infrastructures, applications, devices and so on in the hybrid cloud environment. Its ability of dealing with thousands of items makes it one of the best multi-system monitoring tools. It provides both open source (known as Nagios Core) and commercial version(known as NagiosXI) that can fulfill different customers’ needs.

Nagios for IBM i plugin support provides 15+ basic matrix for the users to monitor their IBM i instances. What is more attractive, it allows the users to customized what to monitor by leveraging IBM i SQL services. This gives the users great flexibility to monitor IBM i system health, application status, work management status, messages, and many other things.

For more information about Nagios for i, please visit the following link.

Nagios for i support - Cloud monitoring

OpenShift, CAM and IBM i

By enabling PowerVC and Ansible for IBM i, this platform and its applications can be managed by OpenShift and CAM. IBM i virtual machines can be managed by CAM and their applications could be managed by Ansible. What is more, IBM i supports different technologies such as REST API, open source and so on, which makes this platform being able to interact with the applications managed with the container technology. More information will be provided later.