Azure ARM features table

Abiquo offers these features in the public cloud integration with Microsoft Azure ARM Compute.

Azure does not let you change the Name and ResourceGroup of a VM. It uses the Name and the ResourceGroup to identify the VM. For Azure, the platform also uses the Name to identify the VM. The VM Name in Azure is always in the ABQ_uuid format.

When the user creates a VM in the platform, by default the friendly name of the VM is the name of the VM template. The user can then edit this label to identify their VM. In Azure, the friendly name is stored as a VM tag. You can easily display these tags in the Azure portal, simply follow the instructions in the Azure documentation.

Azure ARM Feature	Support	Comments
Configure and remove VMs		When you deploy, you’ll select the hardware profile. To search for templates in Azure ARM, the format for a template ID is {region}/{provider}/{name}/{version}. The Name of the VM in Azure is in the format ABQ_uuid and you cannot change it.
Reconfigure VMs		You can edit deployed VMs to attach and detach firewalls and load balancers When the VM is not deployed or powered off, you can reconfigure NICs and hardware profiles
Power on VM
Power off VM
Reset VM
Pause and resume VM
Take a VM snapshot		You must power off the VM in Abiquo and after the snapshot you cannot power it on again. When a VM is used to take an snapshot, it becomes "generalized" in Azure. You cannot power on a generalized VM again in Azure, so all operations will fail with an error message. Future Abiquo releases will undeploy the VM after the snapshot to avoid confusion.
Remote access		Depending on template type, for example: RedHat: template user/password Ubuntu: Using your SSH key registered in Abiquo, or template user/password
Create and delete networks		Each Abiquo VDC will map to an Azure ARM virtual network An Abiquo private network will map to a subnet in the VDC network Users can allocate and assign public IPs (as in AWS)
Create and delete VDCs		Abiquo will not be locked to a single resource group and will be able to manage and onboard existing resources regardless of the resource group they belong to Each Abiquo VDC will map to an Azure ARM virtual network
Create and manage firewall policies
Use Chef		Enterprise Chef or your own server
Use Chef attributes
VM bootstrap scripts
VM variables		Stored as node metadata.
Load balancing
Import and synchronize VMs		To onboard VMs, the enterprise must have credentials registered. The storage of the VMs no longer uses the storage accounts and blob disks. Abiquo now uses the managed disks APIs
VM monitoring and metrics		Abiquo supports monitoring with Azure built-in metrics You can also use the Abiquo monitoring server and Abiquo collectd plugin, which can be installed using the Abiquo Chef cookbook. See Use collectd plugin for custom metrics
Dashboard billing widgets		The Hybrid tab of the Home dashboard view can display public cloud billing information, including the latest bills and estimated bill. See Hybrid and for configuration instructions see Display cloud provider billing data.