Abiquo and VMware vCenter

Abiquo can manage VMware hypervisors in your multi-cloud platform at different levels as:

• vCenter server hosts

• vCenter clusters (as hosts)

Abiquo can also work with NSX-T to create network configurations such as firewalls, load balancers, and NAT.

Supported versions

Abiquo has been tested with the following latest versions.

ESXi 6.x versions prior to 6.7 are supported by earlier versions of Abiquo.

ESXi 5.x versions are NOT supported in Abiquo 5.1.2 and higher versions.

VMware Features

This section describes the VMware ESXi features supported by Abiquo. You can manage VMware technology in Abiquo with vCenter (hosts or clusters) and vCloud Director.

Storage features

Host configuration

This section describes configuration of ESXi hosts.

VMware clusters as hosts

You can add VMware vCenter clusters directly as hosts, so Abiquo will use vCenter clusters instead of individual vCenter servers. When you create a physical machine/hypervisor host in Abiquo for a cluster, select VMware vCenter cluster.

The main advantages of vCenter clusters as hosts are:

• You can make more efficient use of your infrastructure, because when users deploy VMs, Abiquo will allocate them to VMware clusters, and VMware will allocate them to hosts

• Abiquo does not need to track VMs within the cluster because it only interacts with the cluster

All of the VMs in the cluster will be directly listed under the cluster and not on individual hosts.

Host networking

On the ESXi host, the vNICs must be attached to a vSwitch.

For vCenter clusters, you must use dvSwitches (VMware distributed virtual switches or VDSs). Abiquo will retrieve the dVSwitches from the cluster itself, not from the individual hosts.

Optionally, configure the properties for the dVSwitches (see Abiquo configuration properties and search for .dvs.).

Abiquo will automatically create a port group for the host.

Host datastores

Abiquo will deploy VMs to datastores that you register in the platform.

For vCenter clusters, you should use shared datastores, so when VMs move, they will always be accessible to all hosts.

For vCenter hosts, when you use a shared datastore, Abiquo creates a different datastore on each physical machine that is using the datastore. This means that a shared datastore can be enabled on one host and disabled on another, either as a result of user configuration or an issue (e.g. an NFS communication error on one host).

Datastore discovery

Abiquo should discover and list all of the datastores that you will use for deploying VMs. When you add your vCenters, you will select datastores from this list to use in Abiquo.

Abiquo expects to be able to identify each datastore with a UUID, so it will initially try to create a UUID folder on each datastore.

By default, Abiquo retrieves a datastore if it is accessible and not in maintenance mode on all the hosts in the cluster that mount it.

So by default, if there is a host that has all the datastores mounted, but Abiquo cannot access them (e.g. because the host is down), Abiquo will not return any datastores. You can configure Abiquo to return a datastore mounted on at least one host.

You can also configure Abiquo to ignore datastores by name and to ignore datastores that are not writeable.

See Configure datastore discovery for VMware

Datastore checks

As part of the infrastructure check, Abiquo will check datastores to ensure that it can deploy VMs.

Abiquo checks for the following conditions:

• datastore is accessible

• datastore is mounted as read/write

• datastore is not in maintenance mode

If you activated a datastore, but it fails the datastore check, then Abiquo will automatically deactivate it. If it passes a check in the future, then Abiquo will automatically activate it again. If a deactivated datastore fails the datastore check, then Abiquo will ignore it!

Manage datastores in Abiquo

To add, update, and delete datastores, refresh the datastores on the host in Abiquo:

1. Edit the physical machine, and go to the Datastores tab

2. Click the round arrow refresh button. 

To delete a datastore, make sure it is empty and not attached to the host.

Configuration of VM disks

Abiquo supports thin provisioning, and IDE, SCSI, and SATA disk controllers, and you can configure defaults for the platform.

See https://abiquo.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/doc/pages/560988173/Configure+VM+disks+on+VMware and for more options, such as ISO disks, see Configure SATA for VMware hypervisors.

VM templates

You can upload OVA and disk files to the Catalogue so users can create VMs from VM templates by self-service.

See Template compatibility table , Add VM templates to the catalogue  and Importing templates into the catalogue

VM snapshots

Abiquo enables users to manage VM snapshots in the user interface. For a full feature description and configuration details, see Abiquo and VM snapshots for VMware.

Advanced VM configuration

See Advanced configuration of VMs on ESXi

Capture VMs

To prepare and onboard existing VMs into the platform, see About import and capture virtual machines and Import and capture virtual machines.

Remote access to VMs

The platform supports remote access to vCenter VMs with WebMKS using a WebMKS proxy.

This is included in the install process. See Install WebMKS proxy and configure WebMKS

Configure VMware specific properties

Log in to the Abiquo Remote Services server (or for a Monolithic installation, log in to the Abiquo Server) and set the appropriate properties for your system to appropriate values in the /opt/abiquo/config/abiquo.properties file.

Search in the properties documentation table for the following text strings:

• .esxi.

• .dvs.

• vmx_04

• vcenter_cluster

For a list of properties filtered from the main table of Abiquo 6.1.2, see VMware vCenter host and cluster properties table.

For full details of all properties, see Abiquo configuration properties.