There are many other features of IBM PowerVC. Here we have compiled a few of them. The first feature I want to mention is the concept of deploy templates. Administrators can configure image deployment properties and save them as a deploy template. A deploy template includes everything necessary to create a virtual machine quickly and easily. Now, we've explained the concept of images and deploy templates before in this course, but just to recap, as an administrator, you will create images from your virtual machines and then create deploy templates from the images. These deploy templates are the ones that are visible to the user. In this example, the user sees the deploy template, gives a name for the VM they want, and clicks deploy. If the project policy requires that all a new user deployment requests be approved, then they request goes to the Cloud Administrator. The administrator then approves or rejects this new request. A list of current requests are available under the requests tab from the front page of the IBM Cloud PowerVC Manager. The reason why I'm mentioning this is that your Cloud organization should understand the difference between the operations performed by a user, and administrator within your IT environment. A brief overview of multi-tenancy. In the PowerVC, each user must belong to at least one project which provides resources to it's users. A project is equivalent to a tenant as we've seen before. A project is like an office that is rented out in a building. In a virtual space, the size of a project is only limited by resources it contains, you create a separate project when there are needs for dividing or isolating resources in a virtualization environment. A highly secure projects may also require isolation at the infrastructure level. Now, in this example, we see users from user 1 through to user 5. Use 4, for example, belongs to two different projects, that's allowed. For example, you may have one administrator who belongs to all projects. That's okay and perfectly acceptable. A quick side note here. Openstack does not support moving resources from one project to another. You can move volumes and virtual machines on the shared networks by unmanaging them and then re-managing them in the new project. There are many other features we thought we'd list at least some of them here. Some of them may already have been mentioned a little bit earlier. PowerVC supports live capture. That is, you can now create a snapshot of a running virtual machine. There were some older versions of IBM PowerVC where you couldn't do this. This is called Hot Migration, which means that the virtual machines can be migrated while it is running. You can choose a different host in the host group to migrate the virtual machine too, or you can let the host to be chosen by the host group's placement policy. Another great feature to have. You can also export images you create in any of these supported formats and also import them from a previously created file. When images are exported into an OVA Package, the volumes in the image must first be copied into a file system on the PowerVC management server. Therefore, sufficient space must be available to copy all the volumes to files in the file system, and then create an uncompressed OVA package from the volumes. You can create many volumes simultaneously, directly from PowerVC's Create Volume feature. PowerVC now supports changing the owner of a virtual machine from the graphical user interface. Software defined networking or SDN, virtualization network. It allows you to change virtual machine communication without changing your physical network. PowerVC supports SDN only on PowerVMNovaLink managed systems. PowerVC will utilize IBM spectrum scale to deliver it's software defined storage or SDS capabilities. This SDS feature uses the local disks in the host to create a storage cluster across the PowerVM service. PowerVC now supports database as a service directly from it's graphical user interface. With this feature, you can want to click deploy a database along with a set of initial configuration options for the database. You can now configure PowersVC to send e-mails to administrators when certain events happen. Project policies control various aspects of a self-service user's resources and tasks. Administrators can set quotas for resource usage within a project. For example, you can specify how many virtual machines that can be, how many processes the project can use, how much volume storage the project can use, and so on. You can add, remove, and change projects from the user interface. To work with projects, click Projects from the configuration page, you can now work with roles assigned to users and groups from the users in groups page as we've seen before, a project management role is now available and that allows the project manager to approve user requests and therefore, free up the admin user to do other tasks. There are frequent API related to changes in every release. For example, several commands like PowerVC, domain name, PowerVC get token, PowerVC keystone, and PowerVC LDAP config, then now deprecated and new API commands are added. It's not practical to go through all the updates of the product for each of its releases. However, we thought we'd mention a few changes in some recent releases of this product, just to give you a flavor of the new features you can expect from this product. PowerVC version 1.4.3.0 was built on the OpenStack Stein release. It supported Dell EMC PowerMax storage, formerly known as VMAX. It also supported Hitachi Global-Active Device. It increased reliability of long-running migrations by giving admins the ability to set something called a timeout value. It supported active memory sharing. That is, you can manage an agency host that uses a shared memory pool. It also supported management of hosts from Power Enterprise Pool 2.0. Another major feature was a cross HMC remote restart. That is, PowerVC now supports remote restart of virtual machines on the hosts that are managed by different HMCs. All of these features carry over for later releases. Let's look at some more features of the next release just to see what kind of features are being developed. PowerVC backup with --active as the option can be used to take a backup of PowerVC management server even when operations are in progress. This enables PowerVC system administrators to run cron jobs that can take a periodic backup, which can be used to restore PowerVC in the case of any disaster. Admin assistant users can now enable e-mail notifications for DRO events for both advise and active mode, apart from viewing it on the PowerVC user interface. You can now view a new e-mail client named DRO event notifications from the PowerVC user interface that can be enabled or disabled to receive DRO event notifications. PowerVC now supports sharing of images across projects. The admin user of the IBM and default project can use public images which are available across projects. Project administrators can create deploy templates using the shared images. The Messages tab now use the information for every operation along with other details. This helps to understand when a user has performed a specific operation. The username is listed as System for Operations that are Performed by PowerVC Services Internally. Initiator port groups, IPGs, define the set of various ports to be used for volume attachment when using in TID storage. This feature enables different sets of various ports for each type of volume attachment and allows to scale the number of volumes that can be attached to a virtual machine. PowerVC images are backed by storage volumes. When an image with volumes is deployed, the virtual machine uses the clone copy of the image volumes. You can now choose to create an image without any volumes attached. While deploying this image, you can select the existing volumes in the deploy template. This prevents cloning of volumes and avoids any data redundancy. You can choose to soft pin or hard pin a virtual machine to the host where it's currently running. When you soft pin a virtual machine for high availability, PowerVC automatically migrates the virtual machine back to the original host once the host is back to operating state. In the case where the virtual machine has any licensing restriction with the host, the hard pin option helps you to restrict the movement of the virtual machine during remote restart, automated remote restart, DRO and Live Partition Migration, or LPM. Pure Storage is available as an integrated driver in technical preview mode. You can now add a Pure Storage driver by using the CLI and work with it. Cloud-init packaged version shipped as part of PowerVC for Linux distros, it was updated to version 19.1. As an administrator, you should also be curious about fix packs. You can just search and find fix packs for this product from the IBM Fix Central website. In fact, there was a fix pack released just a day before this content was developed. Here are some of the features that were released as part of this fix pack. This is just to give you an idea about the kinds of changes you can expect to see in a fix pack. This fix pack now supports firmware version 950 on the IBM Power servers. That is, you can now fully add hosts running this firmware from IBM PowerVC. Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 8.2 was fully supported as a managed virtual machine from IBM PowerVC. Some tweaks are made so that RMC state of a virtual machine is detected much faster. This was one pain point before where you had to wait a few minutes before the state of the VM stay active or shut down, were displayed on the IBM PowerVC screen. AIX Live Kernel Updates can be performed while Hitachi storage devices were being used. Support was introduced to perform live capture of VMs, even when tape drives were being used on backend storage. We hope that this module has given you enough information about some of the advanced features available in a private cloud environment. For example, in this module, we saw features like active memory expansion, remote restart, dynamic resource optimizer, managing volume life cycles, managing projects. Finally, we saw an overview of the newer features that are being actively developed for this product. So get out there and give some of these features a try. As always, thanks so much for watching.
