Develop your skillset: hands-on training for IBM PowerVC 2.0 and Red Hat Ansible

IBM PowerVC 2.0 hit the market in fourth quarter of 2020. Since then, IBM has produced incremental updates to the software. The IBM PowerVC product development team worked hard to bring modern design and open-source JavaScript frameworks to cloud management on IBM Power. After having tried it for several months, I can’t recommend it more. If you’re using IBM Power servers, you should be running IBM PowerVC to manage them.

I’ve spoken with several new IBM Power administrators who are looking to test drive the product without having to worry about obtaining and managing licenses. There’s a button on the official product page that lets you download a trial version of the software, which you can then use to install in your own environment. But what if you wanted more? For example, everything from understanding the basics of IBM Power virtualization to the latest advanced VM management capabilities of IBM Power.

PowerVC 2.0 Workshop

IBM and our Global Training Partners now have an official IBM PowerVC 2.0 workshop! This gives you several days of access to systems in our IBM data center. You can touch and feel the product from the comfort of your home or office – everything from installation to advanced private cloud management. You can also get an official IBM-approved instructor to deliver the content to your organization.

That’s easily said. But, behind the scenes, IBM has dedicated pools of IBM Power servers in an IBM managed data center. They had to be specifically configured to automate everything from giving you access to a virtual machine that connects you to our network, to setting up a bunch of virtual partitions, virtual Hardware Management Consoles (HMC) and IBM PowerVC NovaLink related configurations. All that happens automatically when you book our workshop.

The PowerVC 2.0 workshop shows you how to set up IBM PowerVC 2.0.1 in both HMC and IBM PowerVM Novalink managed environments. It covers every single major administrative task. That includes a lot of information on OpenStack. We’ll manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and IBM AIX partitions. Automation with Cloud-init and the implications of running your own Infrastructure as a Service cloud are discussed in detail.

Virtual TechU

At the virtual IBM TechU 2021, I will present on something similar. I have sessions on IBM PowerVC and Red Hat Ansible. The idea is to leverage the systems and automation software we’ve created in our data center to showcase our latest capabilities. I have a hands-on session on how to get started with IBM PowerVC to manage your operating systems and perform virtual machine lifecycle tasks. My second hands-on session is on how to get started with Ansible on Linux and run Playbooks to perform configuration management on IBM Power. I will showcase how to implement Ansible on AIX in a third hands-on session. I will also present a demo, on running Ansible on a Linux partition on IBM Power. These Red Hat Ansible sessions are now part of an official IBM training course too, which you can enroll in here. I will also present a general interest hands-on session on using Git and GitHub efficiently to perform source code management tasks.

I’m excited about the new training opportunities that will help you, our clients, to better utilize the IBM solutions critical to running your business. I hope to see you at TechU or a workshop soon.

Source: ibm.com