Abiquo Walkthrough

Take a guided tour of the cloud platform and try key platform tasks, from creating a datacenter to launching a VM.

Introduction

Using Abiquo, service providers and enterprises can build multicloud environments for IAAS. It is a flexible platform where you can provide controlled self-service to your cloud users. The user interface is intuitive and easy-to-use. Users can create new virtual environments by simply dragging and dropping templates or using application blueprints. Administrators can completely whitelabel the user interface with corporate branding at the tenant level.

All of the Abiquo functions that you can perform through the user interface are also available through a RESTful API, which means that you can integrate and automate with the platform.

The Abiquo user interface is divided into a series of views that you can access from the main menu.

The Infrastructure view provides the Cloud Admin with a summary view of the cloud infrastructure. The Statistics tab shows compute (CPU/Memory), storage and networking resources. The Cloud Admin can easily see the resources allocated to cloud users (limits in black) and the used resources (red). It is possible to allocate more resources than those that actually exist, until the users need to consume the real resources.

The resources come from the multiple cloud locations (datacenters and public cloud regions) that are listed in the Infrastructure view on the left of the GUI. The Cloud Admin is able to view and administer multiple locations from the same interface (or single pane of glass). Each location is defined by the presence of Abiquo Remote Services that manage its resources. So a “datacenter” may represent all the resources in one geographic location, or one part of a large environment that is broken down into multiple data centers. And a "public cloud region" represents resources in a public cloud provider, for example, Amazon EC2. The Abiquo datacenter or public cloud region is one level at which you can apply Abiquo control policies. Within the cloud location, the Cloud Admin can view and administer resources, such as compute, networking, and storage.

Click here to show/hide the task: Create a datacenter

Customers wish to leverage existing virtualized infrastructure. Abiquo can manage a pool of IT resources (servers, networking and storage) that are in the same physical location on the same Local Area Network (LAN).

To create a new private cloud datacenter:

Go to Infrastructure view
Go to the Private tab, click the + add button
Enter the Name of the datacenter and the Location. Click Next
Enter the IP address of the monolithic Abiquo server, and click Duplicate IP addresses to copy the remote service locations
Click Accept to use this remote services configuration for the datacenter.

A new Datacenter is created with all available resources managed by Abiquo.

Click here to show/hide the task: Create a public cloud region

Note: For vCloud Director, you must enter the API endpoint and the public cloud credentials in order to retrieve the public cloud regions (for example, in vCloud this is equivalent to a Provider or Org VDC).

To create a new public cloud region

Go to Infrastructure → Public
Click the + add button
Enter the Name for the region, select the public cloud Provider and mark the checkboxes for the Region(s) you wish to use. Click Next.
Enter the IP address of the monolithic Abiquo server. Click Duplicate IP addresses to copy the remote service location.
Click Save to use this remote services configuration for the datacenter.

Abiquo creates new public cloud region(s) with all available resources managed by Abiquo. New public cloud regions are named first with the name that the user enters, and then with this name and a suffix of _1, _2, for example, AWS, AWS_1, AWS_2, and so on.

Next section: Infrastructure