12 Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Power Systems: Volume 1
2.2  Virtual machines meet containers
The use of a hybrid container architecture by combining virtualization by both virtual 
machines and containers can help to address the requirement for a robust cloud computing 
platform.
2.2.1  Perfect recipe for application modernization
For years, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud was the main focus of cloud 
implementations. The goal of IaaS is to provide virtual machines as a service. IaaS standards 
initiatives, such as OpenStack and others, were developed to establish an easy way to 
provision virtual machines. 
Considering the IBM Power Systems environment, the IBM Power Virtualization Center 
(PowerVC) product became the key element for cloud implementation. Software developers 
and vendors created VM images as the way to deploy workloads. Putting in perspective, VM 
clouds were an evolution of the old grid computing architectures, where the elasticity and 
power were determined by the number of nodes that were performing tasks remotely. With 
IaaS, cloud infrastructure became solid and easy to implement.
PowerVC is a virtualization management offering that simplifies the tasks of creating and 
managing virtual machines on IBM Power Systems servers. At the lower level, PowerVC 
works with virtualization resources from PowerVM or KVM on Power hypervisors. 
At a higher level, as shown in Figure 2-2 on page 13, PowerVC interacts with cloud 
management services through OpenStack software infrastructure. It is designed to build a 
private cloud on the Power Systems servers and improve administrator productivity. It can 
further integrate with multicloud environments through higher-level cloud orchestrators.
For more information about PowerVC, see this website.