About import and capture virtual machines

This document describes how to onboard VMs that were created outside the hybrid cloud platform. From private cloud, you can import your existing VMs into the platform. When you capture VMs, the platform will manage them fully and they are the same as native VMs.

Introduction to import and capture VMs

In a private cloud datacenter, when you a hypervisor or cluster to Abiquo, it may already have VMs running on it, and you can import (retrieve) and capture these VMs.

When you import (also called retrieve) VMs, you register them in Abiquo but Abiquo does not manage them. The platform will take into account the resources they use when scheduling and allocating resources, and track their state as part of the virtual infrastructure check. The platform will also include them to improve the accuracy of resource usage statistics.

You can then capture (also called onboard) retrieved VMs so they will be managed by the platform. When you capture a VM it is almost identical to a VM created in Abiquo. The main difference is that when you capture a VM, Abiquo does not have a copy of the template disks in the Catalogue. This means that you cannot automatically create a fresh copy of the VM with the same configuration and the template disks, by undeploying the VM and deploying it again to copy the template from the Catalogue. When you capture a VM, to store the disks in the Catalogue, you can create an Abiquo instance template, which you can then use to create a fresh copy of the VM.

Importing, capturing, releasing and removing VMs from the platform does not change them in the infrastructure; these operations only determine which operations the platform can perform on them.

This diagram shows steps to import and capture VMs that were created outside of Abiquo.

Import and capture of individual VMs is only available in private cloud. To capture resources from public cloud regions, onboard them as part of regions or virtual datacenters. See Manage virtual datacenters#Onboardfrompubliccloud

What does Abiquo import?

To import VMs (also called retrieve VMs), the physical machine must be in an Abiquo private cloud datacenter, or in the process of being added to one. You do not need to enable a datastore to import VMs that are running on the datastore.

What does Abiquo capture?

Abiquo captures the following VM configuration:

• CPU and RAM including hardware profiles

• Remote access configuration for VNC, including the password. But if there is no password, the platform disables remote access

  • If a user later releases a VM, the changes made in the platform will remain in the VM

• MAC addresses of compatible NICs and their VLAN tags and network details. Abiquo recommends that your VMs should have at least one NIC

  • Exception: Abiquo does not capture NICs on IPv6 networks

  • You can configure Abiquo to capture the DHCP configuration, see Abiquo configuration properties#capturedhcp

• Hard disks in compatible formats on the hypervisor datastores. See Template compatibility table

  • For ESXI, the platform will capture DVDs without a defined position in the boot order as ISO disks in the last position in the VM's boot sequence

When you capture a VM from NSX-T, you must add the VM to a VDC with the same network as the VM network. The platform will match the network by provider ID, not by VLAN tag as in the NSX-V integration.

During capture the platform will skip incompatible VMs and incompatible virtual hardware components.

• The platform does not add the virtual datacenter's default firewall policy to a VM as part of the capture process

• The boot disk must always be a "hard disk" on the hypervisor datastore