Introduction to Abiquo and AWS

The Abiquo Amazon EC2 integration is a hybrid cloud feature that enables our customers to add Amazon public cloud regions to the Abiquo platform as part of our agnostic public cloud management. With the Abiquo hybrid cloud platform you will be able to offer a service that is a federation of Abiquo private clouds and the public cloud. Cloud tenants can deploy virtual resources in public cloud regions or in Abiquo datacenters through the same award-winning user interface. You can control the use of public cloud resources in the same way as in the Abiquo Datacenter (quotas, limits, etc).

Amazon Regions are added as Abiquo public cloud regions. Abiquo manages public cloud regions using a set of the Abiquo Remote Services. The remote services used in a public cloud region can be shared with other datacenters or public cloud regions. No NFS repository is required to use with a public cloud region.

Each Abiquo public cloud region corresponds to a single Region in Amazon EC2. Each Abiquo enterprise using the Amazon public cloud region should have its own Amazon account. Abiquo will validate your Amazon credentials (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) with AWS. Each enterprise may register ONE set of credentials for the enterprise's AWS account.

When users create a virtual datacenter in the public cloud region, Abiquo works with Amazon EC2. Abiquo creates a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for each Abiquo virtual datacenter. By default, for each Amazon VPC, Abiquo creates a public subnet and a private subnet, which is a private connect network. The private subnet has an Internet gateway and access to the VPC from outside the cloud is through NAT or Elastic IPs via the public subnet. Elastic IPs are registered in Abiquo as floating IPs. Floating IPs are managed like public IPs but they do not belong to any Abiquo network. Within your virtual datacenter, you can create more Abiquo private networks (subnets in your VPC), which will enable you to deploy to different Availability Zones. The private subnets in the same availability zone as the public subnet will have internet access through the public subnet. 

VMs deployed in the VPC virtual datacenter are Amazon Instances. Add your public key to your Abiquo user before you deploy a VM. Your Amazon instance will be created using your RSA public key to enable remote access. You will need the corresponding RSA private key to access the instance.

How Abiquo Creates a Virtual Private Cloud

In the AWS integration, Abiquo creates VPCs with NAT support with a public subnet, and allows VMs on different subnets to be connected to the same load balancer. Abiquo supports the AWS gateway address as the first address in the network.

Abiquo configures VPC networking Scenario 2 as described in the AWS documentation http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Scenario2.html. 
Under this configuration, users must attach Elastic IPs to VMs with a connection to the public subnet. And by default, VMs in private networks will have internet access through the public subnet. This is helpful for automation because a VM can now connect to the internet to download its configuration, for example, using Chef, without an Elastic IP.

VPC and Subnet

When you create an Abiquo virtual datacenter in an AWS public datacenter, Abiquo creates a VPC with a minimum size of /16 and a subnet of size /24 (or with the sizes defined by the user). The default CIDR for the VPC and the subnet is 192.168.0.0, which is the default private network in Abiquo. You can set a custom private network in Abiquo and this network will be used to create the VPC and subnet in Abiquo. You can create multiple address ranges and Abiquo private networks in different availability zones in the same VPC.

AWS reserves IP addresses in your private networks. It reserves the first four IP addresses and the last IP address of the VPC private connect network. These IP addresses are not displayed or used by Abiquo. Therefore the first available IP address in a network that is defined to start with address 0, will be address 4, and the gateway address will be address 1.

For example, in the default_private_network with network address 192.168.0.0, the following addresses would be reserved or used as the gateway.

Internet Access

Abiquo creates a route table that is equivalent to the AWS route table with the values of the Abiquo private network. You can use the AWS NAT instance for Internet access from the Abiquo virtual datacenter private network. You can acquire floating public IPs for your virtual datacenter and in AWS, these will be created as Elastic IPs with public network addresses. Note that AWS may charge for Elastic IPs when they are NOT in use, i.e. when they are not assigned to a VM or when the VM is not deployed in AWS. You must assign the Elastic IPs to VMs with connections to the Public subnet. When creating a NAT gateway, Abiquo will reuse floating IPs that are not assigned to a VDC. 

Security

By default Abiquo assigns instances to the default VPC security group. This means that by default, all outbound traffic from instances is allowed. Enterprise administrators should configure an Abiquo firewall. Abiquo will create an AWS Security group in the VPC when this firewall is assigned to a virtual datacenter. Users can synchronize their firewalls with AWS, which will import existing security groups. The most basic configuration is to allow SSH inbound traffic, for example, port 22, which will allow SSH connections to the machine through a public IP, NAT, or from a private IP within the virtual datacenter. See AWS Security Groups as Abiquo Firewalls.

Number of IP Addresses per VM

Abiquo supports multiple IP addresses in the AWS integration. You can synchronize existing VMs with multiple IP addresses and create multiple IP addresses through Abiquo, including multiple Elastic IPs. 

Abiquo supports the number of IP addresses supported by the AWS hardware profile (instance type). See http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html#AvailableIpPerENI

If the user adds multiple IPs in the same subnet, Abiquo adds them to the same elastic network interface. And if the IPs are in a different subnet, Abiquo adds them to a different elastic network interface. For information about Elastic Network Interfaces, see http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html

AWS Features

AWS Synchronization

To onboard virtual resources from public cloud:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters and the V. Datacenters list
2. Click the + Add button  select Synchronize public cloud from the pull-down menu
3. The platform opens a dialog box with a pull-down list of public cloud regions. Select one of these regions.
4. After you select the region, there are two possibilities:

• • If the provider supports virtual datacenters, Abiquo will display a list of virtual datacenters
  • If the provider does not support virtual datacenters, Abiquo will automatically onboard the virtual resources in the region

Onboard virtual datacenters from public cloud

To onboard a virtual datacenter:

1. For the public cloud region, the platform will display a list of virtual datacenter entities. For example, VPCs in AWS or Virtual networks in Azure. Select an entity and click Synchronize. 
2. The platform will load all of the elements into a virtual datacenter so they can be managed. For example, from AWS, the platform will import the VPC, VMs, subnet with IP addresses, public IPs, firewalls and load balancers, which will be named with their provider identifiers. 

• The platform will detect a public subnet by the presence of a custom route table and NAT gateway, and the platform will mark the public subnet with a globe symbol and set the Internet gateway flag for this subnet. Users with bespoke network configurations should check the results of the synchronization. The platform will synchronize private and public IP addresses even if they are not in use by VMs, and mark the IP addresses in use by provider entities with provider identifiers.

• The platform will import VM templates. If the VM template cannot be found, the VM will be created in the platform with no registered template. In this case, to save a copy of your VM disk as a template, so you can recreate the VM, make an Abiquo instance of the VM.

  
  

View classic VMs

To view classic VMs, for example in AWS these are EC2 classic VMs, click the "See classic" link. 

Synchronize VDCs and resources

During VDC synchronization, the platform will ensure that the resources in the platform and the provider are the same.

• It will delete entities in the platform that were deleted already in the provider
• However, it will maintain resources attached to undeployed VMs in the platform
  • For example, if a user has an undeployed VM with IPs and a load balancer, then after the synchronization, these resources are attached to the VM in the platform only
  • Warning: These resources are "free" in the provider. Users working directly in the provider could assign these resources to other VMs. This will cause a conflict and error at deploy time

To update a virtual datacenter and onboard any changes made in the provider, synchronize the virtual datacenter:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → V. Datacenters list
2. Beside the virtual datacenter name, click the round arrow Refresh button

You can also synchronize resources such as networks, public IPs, firewalls, and load balancers. To do this, go to the resource tab and click the Synchronize button. For more information, see the resource documentation.

Manage resources that were deleted directly in the provider

When administrators delete resources in the provider, the platform will display the resource name in light gray to indicate that the user cannot work with the resource. The resource types include:

• External networks
• Firewalls 
• Classic firewalls 
• Load balancers 
• NAT network
• NAT IPs

To delete these resources (if they are not in use), select the resource and click the delete button.

Delete or release virtual resources in public cloud

The virtual resources that you onboarded or created in public cloud will be grouped with their associated virtual datacenters.

Before you begin:

1. If you recently created virtual resources, such as load balancers, synchronize the virtual datacenter to ensure that the platform can find and delete all the dependencies of the virtual datacenter.

To delete onboarded resources in public cloud:

1. Delete each virtual datacenter
   • You can choose to delete each virtual datacenter in the platform only, or in the platform and the provider. If you delete in the platform only, the platform will automatically remove VMs, virtual appliances, load balancers, public IPs, and firewalls. Remember to check which is the default VDC in your provider, e.g. AWS default VPC, because it may be inconvenient to delete this VPC

Onboard from public cloud using the API

AWS Firewalls and Load balancers

For general information, see Manage Firewalls and Manage Load Balancers

To configure the load balancer integration:

• Set Abiquo Configuration Properties#amazon for the healthy threshold of machines in AWS in the abiquo.properties file. 
• The Load balancer UI options can be configured in the client-config-custom.json file. See Configure Abiquo UI

In AWS, the platform supports load balancers as described in the following table.

Storage

In Amazon, you can work with volumes that are EBS disks.

General information about EBS disks 

• Users can onboard and create volumes, and attach them to VMs as auxiliary disks. The volumes must be in the same availability zone as the VM network. 
• When you onboard disks, the platform will make them available to users that can access All virtual datacenters in the tenant 
• After users detach auxiliary disks from VMs, the synchronization process will make them available in the virtual datacenter. Users can move disks between virtual datacenters and release them to the region. When users undeploy or delete a VM, the synchronization process will make auxiliary disks available in the virtual datacenter. 

Delete on termination disks

• If you onboard a VM with Delete on termination disks. When you undeploy or delete the VM, the platform will destroy these disks. When you detach the disks from the deployed VM, the platform will synchronize them as volumes in the virtual datacenter. 

Instance templates with multiple disks

• In AWS, users can create an instance template with a copy of the selected VM disks. 

  When you create a VM from an instance template, the platform will display one disk only, with the total size of all disks. After you deploy the VM, the platform will update the additional disks.

Encrypted EBS disks

• You can create encrypted EBS disks in the platform and you can onboard encrypted disks
• If your AWS account has encryption set as the default, all EBS disks will be created with encryption. If you create a disk without encryption, the platform will display a warning message
• The platform will use encryption when you create an instance template of an encrypted disk, and when you create a VM from this template