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Using Abiquo you are able to manage several hypervisors from the same management interface. And you can also deploy the same virtual appliance in different hypervisors. This section provides a list of best practices to achieve maximum compatibility of virtual machine VM templates.
Best practices for hypervisor compatibility
You can use any virtual disk in a supported format as a template to deploy machines VMs in Abiquo , if it is one of the supported formats (- see Template compatibility table). You can install an operating system on a virtual machine VM deployed directly on a hypervisor, and then distribute save the virtual disk file . This virtual disk file is called a virtual machine in a VM template. To ensure that your virtual machine VM template works perfectly, before you distribute it, you should correctly, follow these steps on the virtual machine you are generating the template from.
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Use Template-Repository An easy way to distribute virtual disk files to Abiquo users is through a template repository. See Template-repository documentation |
Disks
Use IDE system disks
Abiquo attaches virtual machine VM before you save it as a VM template and make it available to your cloud users.
Disks
By default, Abiquo attaches VM system disks to IDE controllers on all hypervisors, so Abiquo recommends that you create IDE system disks.
VMware hypervisors can deploy virtual machines VMs with SCSI system disks if this functionality is configured SAS controllers or SCSI controllers for VM disks if you configure them using Abiquo configuration properties. See the VMware configuration page in the Admin Guide.
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When Abiquo deploys virtual machinesVMs with SCSI controllers, it adds uses the LSILogic SCSI controller for the iSCSI volumes used for virtual storage and persistent virtual machines.
LSILogic is the most common virtual SCSI controller used by hypervisors and Abiquo recommends this controller for your virtual machines.
Networks
Choose E1000 network cards as your virtual network adapters
Intel E1000 compatible network cards can be found in the list of available hardware of all the hypervisors Abiquo supports. If you want to run your virtual appliances in different hypervisors, use E1000.
Two new types of network card were introduced in Abiquo v2.0by default. Abiquo supports additional SCSI controllers. You can configure SCSI disk controllers using Abiquo configuration properties.
Networks
Virtual network adapters
By default Abiquo uses Intel E1000 network drivers which are highly compatible with all systems. Abiquo also supports PCNet32 and VMXNET3 drivers on VMware, and VIRTIO drivers on KVM.
Configure networking to use DHCP
Abiquo works with an embedded DHCP server that controls the IP leases according to the specifications of the virtual machine in the interface. For the machines to receive their IP addresses correctly, the Machine Templates you deploy should have Select dynamically-assigned IP addresses in their your default configuration. Otherwise they will be receiving the same static IP the machine had while the template was being generated, leading to possible conflicts or, most likely, out of range addresses.VM configuration to ensure that your VMs all receive different IP addresses! 
Erase MAC addresses from network scripts
Some operating systems store the , such as Red-Hat, store your VM’s MAC addresses in their network initialization scripts. This happens, for example, in Red-Hat-based Linux systems such as Fedora and CentOS. This is not correct: when a template is deployed to create a virtual machine, a new MAC address is assigned but the content of the network scripts is always the same, and if both the current MAC and the one specified in the script do not match, the network script will fail, leaving the network interface down. To ensure this does not happen, we need to Abiquo assigns a new MAC when you deploy a VM from a template, but any old network script with an old MAC will fail and the VM network will not come up. So be sure
To ensure VMs will deploy correctly with a working network, erase all trace of physical addresses in the network scripts.
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Virtual disk file formats
Use VMDK monolithic flat to build your template
VMDK monolithic flat format can be used in several hypervisors without any conversion. If access to the template file is local, this is the best format to use.
Distribute templates in a compressed format
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Compressed format
VM Templates can be very large and flat formats can have a size equal to the total virtual disk capacity. To minimize download overhead when distributing a virtual machine template from a remote template repositoryVM template, convert it to a compressed format like VMDK-streamOptimized or QCOW2-compressedSparse.
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