Overview of the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Provider

This topic provides an overview of the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure provider (formerly IBM SoftLayer). It includes the following sections:

Product overview

Ensure that your IBM Bluemix Infrastructure account has administrative privileges with API key access.

With an IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Provider integration with BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, you can perform the following actions:

• Onboard the provider

• Register user accounts

• Search for an onboard LDCs

• Automatically onboard custom and OS images

• Perform single-tier and multi-tier service provisioning

• Start, stop, decommission, shut down provisioned VMs

• Perform software installation: Single tier and multi tier

• Configure these TRO options:
  • Update CPU and Memory
  • Add Disk
  • Add Software Packages

The following functionality is not supported:

• Manual onboarding of images

• These self-service functions: 
  • Transferring an SOI
  • Sharing a VM
  • Requesting on behalf of another user

• Bare-metal provisioning

• Advanced networking features

• Firewall and load balancer support

• Creating a network blueprint from BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

• Quota management

• TRO Options:
  • Remove Disk
  • Add Server

Limitations

This section discusses limitations of the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Provider.

Provider registration and deregistration

Only one instance of the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Provider can be registered at one time.

Installable resource (OS and custom image) automatic onboarding

After deregistering or deleting installable resources (IRs)—either OS or custom—the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Provider administrator must manually remove them from the cloud database.

Manual entry of an IR is not feasible because some fields in the IR cloud object cannot be filled through the product catalog UI. These fields are used in the code when the virtual machine is created.

Offboarding LDCs

Even if you have a mapping from a logical hosting environment (LHE) to a tenant, you can still offboard IBM Bluemix Infrastructure logical data centers (LDCs), but BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management will not return an error.

Virtual machine (VM) creation

• If a VM is provisoned with only public VLANs, the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure Rest API produces an error that says backed-up VLANs are mandatory.
• If a VM is provisioned with two private VLANs, one IP is assigned to new VM on IBM Bluemix Infrastructure.
• VM provisoning on IBM Bluemix Infrastructure can take up to 30 minutes.
• When a user provisions a VM with multiple SAN disks, sometimes the disks are not reflected on the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure portal. (Not all attached disks are shown.)

VM deletion

Deletion of a VM can from 5 minutes to up to 24 hours. (IBM Bluemix Infrastructure has not defined an upper limit.) From BMC Lifecycle Management, an asynchronous request might be sent to delete a VM, and it is deleted, but it might still be visible on the portal.

User provisioning

If a user is created on IBM Bluemix Infrastructure through its API, it is visible on the portal, but you cannot log on to the VM as that  user. As a workaround, use BMC Server Automation to provision the user on the custom image.

TRO operations

• When transaction requestable offering (TRO or Day 2) operations (such as Add Disk, Modify CPU, or Modify RAM) are performed, the VM is restarted on the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure portal, and the start date disappears. After some time, the VM is updated automatically.
• If a user adds multiple hard drives through a TRO (Day2) operation  and then the user selects multiple option choices, the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management task fails with this error: Error in upgrading virtual guest : There is a pending upgrade request for this virtual server instance. However, the disks are still added to the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure instance and the operating system can use them.
  

Required conditions

This section discusses required conditions when using specific functionality in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

Multiuser account (create, update, list and delete)

On a multiuser account, the users must have virtual guest permission on IBM Bluemix Infrastructure, and their API keys should be available on the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure portal.

Logical data center (LDC) search

Data centers that users can use should have at least one VLAN associated with them. A VLAN can be associated with data center through a support ticket or manual creation of a VM in that data center on the IBM Bluemix Infrastructure portal.

VM creation

• Each VM in IBM Bluemix Infrastructure has a public and private IP or has only a private IP. In service blueprints, NICs should be specified accordingly. For example,a blueprint might include two NICs or only a single NIC, depending on the business's use case.
• You should create a diskType tag group with the tag names of Local and SAN. (You can create the tag group at any time—before, during, or after blueprint creation.) By default, IBM Bluemix Infrastructure selects a 25 GB SAN disk.
• You should create a BluePrint boolean parameter named "isHourlyCharged." If this parameter is not created, then by default, the billing mode is Hourly.
• You should create a BluePrint boolean parameter named "isPublicVM." If this parameter is not created, then by default, the CPU core type is Public.

Software installation

• An RSCD agent should be installed on the target VM.
• Port 4750 should be open on the target VM.
• For a private VM (which has only a private IP), a VPN should be configured (assuming that the RSCD agent is installed and port 4750 is open on it).

DRO operations

You should always apply a DiskType tag group for each additional disk option you want to add. (You can create the tag group at any time—before, during, or after blueprint creation.)

Resource mapping

Supported BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management operations