These features were introduced in Abiquo 5.0
- Abiquo tags vCloud Director Organization vDCs
Abiquo can register vCloud Director Provider vDCs as public cloud regions. This enables multiple Abiquo tenants to use the associated Organization vDCs.
- Availability Sets in Azure
- Abiquo 5.0 introduces support for Availability Sets in Azure to enable users to separate workloads for high availability. All of the VMs in an availability set must be in the same Azure Virtual Network, which means they must be in the same Abiquo virtual datacenter.
- Configure reseller email accounts
Abiquo supports cloud reseller configurations and Abiquo 5.0 enables each reseller to have their own mail server and account for sending emails.
In previous versions, the platform sent all emails from the central email account and server, which you can configure with the server.mail and mail properties. See Abiquo configuration properties#server and Abiquo configuration properties#mail.
You can also configure the messages sent by the platform. See Configure email templates.
- Create public cloud accounts
Abiquo 5.0 introduces the Create accounts feature for public cloud with AWS and Azure.
In the user interface, after you add your partner credentials, you can then easily create accounts for your customers. Just click the Create account button.
- Limit bandwidth of NAT IPs with QoS
- Abiquo 5.0 enables the user to set a bandwidth in a virtual datacenter for all the NSX NAT IPs using Quality of Service (QoS traffic shaping) parameters.
- This feature requires a new privilege to Manage NAT bandwidth limit. During an upgrade or when you create a virtual datacenter, the new "natbandwidthlimit" attribute is present but you must edit the virtual datacenter to enable it in the platform and in the NSX.
- Reset guest password in vCloud Director
Abiquo 5.0 introduces a new functionality to reset the guest password in vCloud Director.
This requires an additional privilege to Reset VM guest password.
- The platform will send the new password by email or SMS, using the same email template that informs the user of the initial guest password. See Guest setup for configuration details.
The user can then connect to the VM by clicking the console button and entering the root or administrator username, followed by the initial guest password. We recommend that the user changes this password as soon as possible.
The remote console connection to the VM is via WebMKS and the administrator can brand the console window. See Branding WMKS
- Send webhook action in action plans
Abiquo 5.0 introduces the Send webhook action in action plans. With this action a user can send an HTTP request.
When creating the action, the user simply enters the Endpoint URL.
The user can select a Method, although the default method is GET. The user can then enter the request Body, which is the request content. And the user can add request Headers as required.
And finally the user can select the Expected response that will allow the action plan to continue. If the user does not enter a value, the action plan will continue if it receives the default response of 204 - No content.
Limitations
- The administrator must configure connection timeouts, which cannot be infinite or disabled. See Abiquo configuration properties#actionplan
- All HTTPS requests will trust all server certificates
- vCloud firewalls at Edge level
- In Abiquo 5.0, the platform implements vCloud firewall policies and classic firewalls at the Edge level, which is the distributed virtual firewall in vCenter and NSX. In previous versions we use VM IP literals but now we specify the VM object.
- Create users to access the cloud provider portal
In Abiquo 5.0.1+, the user can easily create a user account in a cloud provider when the enterprise already has API credentials. From here the user can also click a link to access the cloud provider portal.
Abiquo displays the public cloud account identifiers on the Credentials tab.
Users will work with this feature when: 1. The reseller created a cloud account for the enterprise and the API credentials are in the user's enterprise, but the user has no console account. 2. The enterprise's IT administrator created a cloud account for the enterprise and allows the tenant administrator to create a user account
To create a user, your enterprise must have API credentials for the cloud provider with permissions to create users. (When a reseller creates an account in Azure, it now has the User Administrator role to create users). And your user must have the privilege to "Manage user creation in provider".
- Accept terms of use for Azure VM templates
Certain Azure templates have terms of use (also called End User License Agreement - EULA) and you will need to accept the terms before you can deploy the templates in Abiquo. In Azure, this means that you enable programmatic deployment of the VM templates for your subscription.
You need to accept any terms of use once for each VM template that your enterprise will use.
To accept the terms in Abiquo, you will need the privilege to "Accept virtual machine template terms of use". By default, this privilege is assigned to the Cloud administrator and Enterprise administrator roles.
Abiquo 5.0.1 enables you to accept the terms after you click to import a template into the Apps library.
If you share a template to other enterprises, then the users of these enterprises must accept the terms the first time that they create VMs using the shared template.
If you disable programmatic deployment in the Azure portal, you will need to delete the template and import it again, in order to accept the terms and deploy a VM.
- Support for Azure Plans
Abiquo supports billing for Microsoft Azure Plans, which is a type of partner account. Under Azure Plans there can be more than one subscription that belongs to the same Azure customer. And there are some products and services that Azure invoices to the customer and not the subscription.
In the cloud platform, each subscription belongs to a different tenant enterprise. So for each customer, to define the tenant enterprises that should NOT receive bills for the customer's products and services, add the "onlyAzureSubscriptionBill" enterprise property with an empty or random string value.
- This property was changed in Abiquo 5.2.0. See the latest documentation at Display Azure billing data