Infrastructure

Abiquo is a thin, unintrusive management layer on top of the existing infrastructure and there is no impact on any VMs that are already running. The Cloud Admins can add the physical and virtual infrastructure to Abiquo in a controlled way on their own timescales.

Private cloud

In the Infrastructure view, on the Private tab, you can incorporate your datacenter's compute, storage, and network resources into the Abiquo platform. You can also create allocation rules to control the use of these resources.

Compute

In Abiquo datacenters, compute resources are servers running one of the supported hypervisors. We also call them physical machines or hyperivsor hosts.

The Cloud Admin adds compute resources to logical groups, which are Abiquo racks. For a standard networking configuration, you would usually align the Abiquo rack to a top of rack network switch. You can also align VMware clusters with Abiquo racks.

Cloud Admins can easily add hypervisors to Abiquo by entering the IP address of the hypervisor managers or the hypervisors. Through the hypervisor, Abiquo will retrieve information about the physical machine and add the CPU and memory resources to the resource pool.

As part of the physical machine configuration, for standard networks, the Cloud Admin will select a virtual switch, and the Cloud Admin will select the datastore/s that Abiquo can use when deploying new VMs.

When you add hypervisor datastores to Abiquo, you can present them to the cloud users in datastore tiers to represent different service levels.  So you can provide multiple storage types with different performance, features and price points, and cloud users can select the appropriate tier for their requirements. 

The platform can retrieve VMs that were launched before you added the hypervisor to Abiquo.  You can capture these VMs to manage them with Abiquo.

Network

In private cloud, the options for Abiquo networking are: SDN integrations, standard networking, and guest setup.
Abiquo integrates with the VMware NSX system for software defined networking to manage private networks, NAT, firewalls, and load balancers in Abiquo virtual datacenters.

With standard networking Abiquo will manage the virtual networks that are provisioned with VMs.
It does not integrate with network devices (e.g. switches), so the Network Admin will need to configure the switches and routers and provide a pool of VLANs that Abiquo can manage.

With guest setup you can use hypervisor tools or cloud-init to configure VM networks.

Datacenter networks

In datacenters, Abiquo manages 3 types of virtual networks: private networks, external networks, and public networks. 

Private networks

Private networks only exist within the Abiquo cloud environment. Private networks enable VMs in the same virtual datacenter to communicate with each other.  Abiquo can completely manage these networks and you can allow users to create their own private networks on a self-service basis.

In standard networking, you define a pool of network tags in the Abiquo rack configuration and Abiquo will automatically assign an unused VLAN to a new private network. 

When you use SDN integrations, Abiquo creates the private networks in the domain of the SDN system as specified by the Admin and using the SDN technology.

The Admin can also assign an IP on the external network as a gateway IP for the private networks, to enable external connectivity for the VDC. 

External networks

In Abiquo datacenters, an external network allows communication with the external infrastructure and it belongs to a single enterprise (cloud tenant).

The Cloud Admin must define IP ranges and VLANs that align with the switches and routers beyond the cloud environment. 

For example, for service providers, you can assign each customer a dedicated VLAN and provide seamless connectivity to the cloud through existing MPLS or VPN connections.

And for enterprise customers, your departments (Abiquo enterprises) can connect to the corporate LAN.

For a tenant and/or virtual datacenter, you can change the default private network to make an external network the default, which provides easy connectivity when you deploy a new environment.

When using SDN integrations, Abiquo may manage the IP addresses of the external networks. An unmanaged network is a type of the External network with IP addresses that are managed outside of Abiquo.

Public network

In an Abiquo datacenter, tenants can share a public network, which may contain public IP addresses. Tenants obtain (purchase or reserve) IPs in public networks for their virtual datacenters and then they assign them to VMs. Abiquo's accounting services track public networks, so they are ideal for providing internet IP addresses that you can charge back to an enterprise.

Storage

In Abiquo datacenters, Abiquo uses several different storage types. 

On hypervisors, Abiquo supports any storage that can be used as a hypervisor datastore. So Abiquo can provision a new VM to any storage type including fibre channel, iSCSi, and NFS.

Abiquo requires an NFS share for its Catalogue where it stores VM images and templates within each datacenter.

Allocation rules

In Abiquo datacenters, allocation rules define how Abiquo will use the underlying infrastructure to deploy VMs. The allocation rules include compute load level rules where you can configure allocation or subscription of CPU and RAM, and storage load level rules for datastores.

Abiquo supports compute allocation rules at the VMware cluster level. The Cloud Admin can also use features built into the underlying hypervisor technology, such as VMware's Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS). 

Public cloud

On the Public tab, the Infrastructure view displays the public cloud regions and the tenants that can use these regions. Each tenant will also require their own set of public cloud credentials that will enable them to use the API of the cloud provider. Abiquo offers some basic guides on how to Obtain public cloud credentials.

In public cloud regions that support networking, users can create private networks and work with features such as Availability Zones. In public cloud, the Cloud Admin does not manage public networks. However, tenants acquire floating IPs for their virtual datacenters and assign them to their VMs as in private cloud.