Extended vCloud Director integration

Abiquo has been working hard to consolidate and extend our integration with vCloud Director. As in previous versions, Abiquo onboards vApps from vCloud Director as VDCs where you can create VMs using templates from the vCloud Director template repository.

You can now hot reconfigure VMs if their vCloud Director templates and operating systems allow it, and the platform will now use the VMXNET3 ethernet driver by default for vCloud Director.

Use VMXNET3 internet driver

Users can work with VM templates with multiple disks, although the platform still represents these as a single disk with the total size of all disks. When you onboard a VM, the VM is not linked in the platform to its template in the vCloud registry. So you need to create an instance (clone VM disks into the registry), which Abiquo will then automatically link to its VM template, to make it available to deploy. So users can then undeploy and redeploy the onboarded VM.

When importing templates into the platform, the private checkbox filters to display templates in the same organization, and the public checkbox filters to display templates in other organizations.
Abiquo onboards and synchronizes private and external networks, although you must create static routes and NAT configurations directly in vCloud Director. In vCloud Director, when you create an external network that can support load balancers (direct or routed, with a connection to an Edge), you must create a static IP pool for load balancers, which represents the number of load balancers that users can create in this network. If there is no static IP pool, Abiquo will not onboard the network.

VCD external networks

As in the previous version of Abiquo, you can onboard existing Edge firewalls from vCloud Director as Classic firewalls in Abiquo. Do not create vCloud Director security groups for VMs because they are not supported in the platform.

In vCloud Director, load balancers can span more than one vApp, and Abiquo 4.5 supports load balancers that span Abiquo VDCs. When you create a load balancer for vCloud Director, you must select a "public address" on an external network connected to the Edge (meaning external to the OrgVDC or external routed networks). The platform does not support private subnets for load balancers in vCloud Director, or NSX-Edge Compact or fenced vApps. You can onboard compatible load balancers.

See VMware vCloud Director integration