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Introduction to Abiquo
Abiquo is a cloud computing platform that enables you to manage public clouds and private clouds. You can use your own physical infrastructure to provide infrastructure as a service. It is a hypervisor agnostic model (no vendor lock-in) and it provides a unified interface for managing:
- VM templates
- Compute
- Network
- Storage
- Events
Abiquo Datacenters
In private cloud, a datacenter consists of:
...
Abiquo is designed to manage multiple datacenters and public cloud providers.
Hypervisors
Abiquo manages multiple hypervisors and conversions between hypervisors.
Managed by the vendor-provided API:
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And Abiquo also works with public cloud providers.
Abiquo
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remote services
The Abiquo platform uses Remotes Services to manage the hypervisors. The Abiquo remote services found in each datacenter are:
- Appliance Managermanager
- Business Process Managerprocess manager
- Discovery Managermanager
- Virtualization Managermanager
- Virtual System Monitorsystem monitor
- Remote Access Manageraccess manager
- Services manager
Appliance
...
manager
Provides the ability to upload and download VM templates into repositories available to the datacenter. Administrators may use the AM API to manage templates.
Business
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process manager
Provides conversion of VM templates between disk formats supported by hypervisors and export to public cloud providers, thus eliminating vendor lock-in.
- Conversion requests and responses are submitted via message queues
- Requests are processed one at a time, because working at NFS level implies being careful of I/O conflicts
- Uses RabbitMQ as a message broker
Discovery
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manager
Provides hypervisor discovery of the following:
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Also manages external storage.
Virtualization
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manager (Virtual Factory Remote Service)
This is the common layer to unify and manage the virtualization capabilities of each hypervisor type. Manages the life cycle of the VMs and network and storage configuration for VMs. Job requests and responses are submitted via message queues (RabbitMQ) with an actor-based model using Akka.
Virtual
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system monitor
Manages a set of monitors. Each monitor examines the state of VMs and notifies changes. It uses Redis as a subscription store and the pubsub mechanism for event notifications from each monitor. State changes are notified via message queues (RabbitMQ).
Server
The Abiquo Server manages an arbitrary number of datacenters by accessing their remote services. Communications between modules and datacenters are performed via RabbitMQ. MySQL stores the system configuration and state. The platform also offers enterprise functionality: pricing, scheduling, security. The server exposes its data and operations via a REST API.
Architecture
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diagram
Technology
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stack
The Abiquo technology stack includes the following projects.
- Apache projects
- Thrift
- Commons
- Others
- MySQL (MariaDB)
- Redis
- RabbitMQ
- Akka
- Libvirt
- Jersey
Virtual machine operations
This section outlines the VM operations in the virtual factory. The implementation uses asynchronous communication and independent, concurrent operations. It offers improved scalability, traceability, performance and stability.
This document assumes a good working knowledge of the Abiquo platform.
Advantages
- Scalability
- asynchronous VM operations
- independent
- concurrent
- asynchronous VM operations
- Traceability
- simple, standardized VM definition for all hypervisors
- error messages and logs
- monitoring console
- Performance
- non-blocking operations
- Stability
- improved reconfigure
- improved rollback
- standardized and unified hypervisor communication
- automated testing
Scalability and
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stability
The virtual factory is based on VM abstraction. Thus all operations are performed on a single VM. This provides scalability and stability because each VM is independent.
...
The hypervisor plugin abstraction has one common interface and one plugin for each hypervisor type (including public cloud providers, or in some cases, public cloud regions).
Virtual
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machine implementation
The virtual factory works with two interfaces: the hypervisor connection and the VM resources. Actions are performed on the VM that move it between the VM states.
Virtual
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machine and
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hypervisor actions
- Hypervisor Connection
- login
- logout
- Virtual Machine
- configure
- reconfigure
- unconfigure
- snapshot
- get state
- power on
- power off
- stop
- resume
Virtual
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machine states diagram
Deployment
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scenario
To deploy a virtual appliance containing N virtual machines, we operate directly on each VM. We perform
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The virtual factory coordinates these tasks.
Performance and
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scalability
The key to the performance and scalability of the VM operations is asynchronous communication. Communications between the API/Server and the virtual factory are all "send and forget" requests, so the operations on a VM are independent. The platform achieves high performance and scalability because it does not wait for requests on other VMs in a virtual appliance.
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RabbitMQ is shared by all datacenters on the Abiquo platform. RabbitMQ is a single message broker for all infrastructure.
Tasks and
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uobs
Tasks are performed on virtual machines. A task is a collection of jobs.
Tasks are executed independently and concurrently. Within tasks, jobs can be dependent and sequential or concurrent.
For example, when deploying a virtual appliance. There are two independent and concurrent tasks: deploy VM 1 and deploy VM 2. Within each task there are two dependent jobs: Configure and Power on.
Inside the Virtual Factory
The components of the virtual factory and their basic functions are as follows.
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The number of concurrent sessions is limited by resources because you cannot have more open sessions than the number of cores in your hypervisor host. It can also be controlled at the platform level, and for hypervisors/providers and for VDCs using the Abiquo Configuration Properties. For example, for the platform, the abiquo.virtualfactory.openSession property controls the default number of simultaneous operations on a single hypervisor or provider, and by default it is set to 2. To configure the number of concurrent connections, see Control the number of concurrent operations.
Traceability
The system provides progress of VM tasks and a new console is under development to allow you to check the states of current job execution. Job and task states are saved in the Datacenter REDIS while the task is in progress. Job and task state changes are notified to Abiquo Server/API.
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The virtual factory has a common step log, which means the same steps are logged by each hypervisor or provider. For example, all hypervisors log: start template copy and finish template copy. This information can be found in the virtual factory log and as INFO level logging in Catalina.out. In the future, this information will also be accessible to the API.
Handling
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failed tasks
What happens when a task can't be executed properly? The virtual factory offers full roll back of jobs from the same task that have already been executed. In addition, it offers full clean up of failed tasks and jobs. The hypervisor is returned to the original state. This ensures the stability of the platform.
The virtual factory ensures that the VM state is always consistent. This means that if an operation fails, you can always retry.
Appendix: Inside the
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virtual factory
The diagram below shows the interaction between the elements of the virtual factory in dealing with requests and responses.
- Queue Manager: handles incoming queue messages
- Task Orchestrator: decides when to send a job
- Virtualization Worker: executes the VM operation
Queue
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manager
- Receives Task message from the API or Server using the RabbitMQ connection.
- checks the message and sends the task to the Task Orchestrator
- Receives Task response (from Task Orchestrator) then acknowledges the AMQP message
- the message is deleted from the queue
Task
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orchestrator
- Receives Task Messages
- saves the current task message
- saves a map of task IDs to jobs IDs
- if it's a sequential task, send the first job to a VW
- it it's a concurrent task, send all the jobs to many VWs
- if the job being sent is a task, send to itself
...
- Receives Task Results
- only intermediate task results, because task is also a job.
- perform the same logic as a Job Result
Virtualization
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worker
- Receives Job Messages
- create a new instance of Hypervisor Connection and perform the VM operation
- send back a Job Result when it's done