After you log in, you may need to edit your user account to update your details:

1. Click the User icon in the lower left-hand corner of the screen
   
2. From the menu, select Edit user
   
3. Change your Password
4. To receive VM passwords, login authentication codes, and email notifications, enter your E-mail address and Phone number
   
   
5. Go to Advanced and add your Public key for remote access to VMs
   

If you are using a single sign on, you may need to ask your system administrator to update your details

Your platform may offer or require two-factor authentication (2fa) to improve user login security with an additional authentication code. For platform configuration instructions, see Configure two factor authentication.

Before you begin:

• To use Google Authenticator to obtain the codes, install the Google Authenticator app on your cell phone. 
• To use email authentication to obtain the codes, check that you have a valid email address in your user account on the platform.

To enable two-factor authentication for your user account, do these steps:

1. Click on the user initials or user icon in the lower left corner of the screen, and from the menu, select Two-factor authentication.
2. Select the authentication method and click Enable

3. Copy the Backup codes from the configuration window to a secure place. You can use these codes to log in to the platform if the authentication cycle fails

   The platform will display Backup codes ONCE only

4. Authenticate according to your selected method
   • For Google Authenticator, use the Google Authenticator app on your cell phone to scan the QR code. Google will supply a verification code in the app. During login, the platform will request the Authentication code from the app. 
   • For email, during login, every time you enter your user name and password to log in, a code will be sent to the E-mail address registered in your user account. Enter the Authentication code in the Login dialog

To create a virtual machine (VM) do these steps.

1. Open the Virtual datacenters view by clicking its icon
   
2. If there are no virtual appliances to hold groups of VMs, click Create a virtual appliance
   Enter a Name and select a Virtual datacenter, and enter optional values and click Save
   
3. Open a virtual appliance to hold a group of VMs by clicking the Open button on its card
   
4. To create a VM, click Create virtual machine and select a VM template. You can also double-click the VM template
   If there is more than one version of the VM template, you can select another version.
   For the Name, enter a user-friendly label for the VM. Abiquo will use this name when creating the VM in the provider. 
   
   • If the provider does not support duplicate names, for example vCenter, Abiquo will add a number in brackets after the name. For example, if you another user already created two VMs from a template named TEMPLATE, then your next two VMs will be named TEMPLATE (2) and TEMPLATE (3). If you later try to rename the VM to a name that already exists in the provider, then Abiquo will return the hypervisor error.

5. If required, select a hardware profile

6. If required, accept the terms of use

7. If required, select a datastore tier, which is the datastore service level, for your VM disk/s

    Click here to show/hide the screenshots

   Select a hardware profile

   

   Select a datastore tier

   

   Accept VM template terms

   

The platform will create your VM. The status bar on the VM icon displays the NOT_ALLOCATED state, which means that the VM has not been launched into the cloud.

The Template tab contains compatible templates only. If you cannot see an expected template, contact your system administrator.

To filter templates:

• Click the filter funnel button and select a Category from the pull-down list
  • To display only ISOs, select the checkbox
• Enter text (including * wildcards) in the Search box and press Enter

To clear the search:

• Click the Clear link on the Category filter popup, which will clear both category and text search box
• Click the grey x button in the Search box

To launch your VMs, click Deploy virtual appliance above the Virtual machines pane on the right-hand side of the screen.

The platform will launch the VMs and power them on. The status bar below each VM icon will be coloured green. And the Deploy virtual appliance button changes to become the Undeploy virtual appliance button, which you can click to destroy the VMs.

To display VM details, select a VM icon. The platform will display the control panel below the VMs with details on different tabs, such as General and NICs.

To display metrics of a deployed VM with metrics enabled, click the Metrics symbol on the VM icon.

To refresh metrics data, click the circular arrows refresh button on the right.

To toggle the display of metrics, click Available metrics on the right, and select the desired metrics.

To filter metrics, click the funnel symbol. Enter the Granularity, Statistics, Period, and/or Dimensions.

To configure the display of metrics at the virtual appliance level, do these steps.

1. Select a Virtual appliance and go to Monitoring
2. Optionally configure the refresh interval. To do this, select the Refresh data every checkbox and enter a number of minutes
3. Choose the metrics you wish to display and filter by metric statistics.

To refresh the display with the latest data from the API, click the round arrow refresh button.

The multicloud platform supports power actions to easily stop, start, pause, and reset VMs.

To stop a VM that is deployed and powered on:

1. Select the VM icon
2. Click the Power off button, which has three horizontal lines.
3. Select from the following options:

   1. Shut down: The platform will try to gracefully shut down the VM. This option may require hypervisor and guest VM configuration

   2. Power off: The platform will perform a hard power off on the virtualization technology. Warning: Using this option may cause loss of data

      Microsoft Azure (ARM)

      The VM power menu in Azure has the following options:

      • • Deallocate to stop the VM and remove resources
        • Power off to shut down the VM

      Screenshot: Shutdown and Power Off options
      

Remember that stopping a VM does not destroy it in the cloud provider and the VM is still consuming resources.

To power on a VM, click the Start button, which is a "play" button with a right facing triangle

Depending on the cloud provider, you may also be able to perform the following actions:

• Pause a VM to suspend it using the double vertical bar button, then power on to restart
• Reset a VM to restart it using the circular arrow around a play button

The platform displays the appropriate buttons for the provider and the current state of the VM.

The platform enables you to connect to a console of a deployed and powered on VM for remote access. 

• The following configuration is required before you deploy the VM in public cloud.
  • Your user account must have an SSH Public key
  • The VM must have a firewall to allow SSH, or RDP for Windows
  • In AWS the VM must have a private IP on a public subnet and a public IP. The firewall must allow SSH for Linux and Windows VMs
  • In Azure the VM must have a public IP
• Remember that it may take up to 15 minutes after deploy for the initial guest password to propagate to a VM, especially for Windows systems

To connect to your VM from 

1. To obtain the default username and password, go to the VM details on the General tab and click Default credentials
2. To open the connection, on the VM control panel, click the console icon
   
   
3. A console should open to allow you to log in to your VM. The platform will automatically complete the Username
   • For Windows VMs on Azure, enter the Password
   • For all Linux VMs, and for Windows VMs on AWS, enter the SSH private key (also called the Decryption key)

The remote access connection to the VM will open and you can log in and work with the VM. 

• Remember to change your administrator password as soon as possible.

Troubleshooting:

• On ESXi, you cannot change the remote access password using hot reconfigure. You must restart the VM for the password change to take effect

To manage VM tags:

1. On the VM icon, from the options menu, select Tags
   
   
2. Edit tags as described below
   

When you add another VM to a deployed virtual appliance, the platform does not launch it directly into the cloud.

You can deploy new VMs individually or click the Deploy all VMs button in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

After you deploy a VM, the changes you can make will depend on your cloud provider. To change the configuration of a deployed VM do these steps:

1. Select the VM
2. If your provider or operating system does not support using hot add and hot reconfigure, power off the VM, using the Stop button on the control panel
3. Mouse over the VM and from the options menu, select Edit.
4. In the Edit VM dialog, go to General, and make changes as required to:
   1. Name, which is the VM friendly name
   2. CPU and RAM (if your VM is not using hardware profiles)
   3. Remote access in private cloud
      1. If you disable remote access, hypervisor configuration will remain but you cannot access it through the console icon
      2. If you change the password, the change will be applied when you save the VM. Remember that it can be a maximum of 8 alphanumeric characters, i.e.. a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9. If you delete the password, the screen requesting the password will not appear. On ESXi hypervisors, if you set a password and later delete it, the password will be blank, not null. The screen requesting the password will appear, and you should press <Enter> to continue. 
   4. Description of the VM
   5. Hardware profiles
5. Make changes to Networks and Storage, Firewalls, and Load balancers as required
6. Click Save

The changes will be applied in the cloud provider directly.

To configure your VM backup by selecting the backup policy and the disks, do these steps:

1. Edit the virtual machine and go to Backup → Backup policies
   
   
2. Select from the list of Backup policies
3. Click Show details. Depending on your system configuration and user privileges, you may be required to configure different backup options. Examples of backup options
   
   

4. If required, enter backup frequency, or date and/or time

   Backup Times

   Abiquo uses ISO 8601 and you should check the time standard used in each datacenter with the datacenter owner

   Time zones in ISO 8601 are represented as local time (with the location unspecified), as UTC, or as an offset from UTC

5. If required, select disks
   
   • Note: Some backup systems will ignore your disk selection and create a backup of all disks. Check your cloud provider's documentation for more information

A user can protect their VMs with the disaster recovery service (DRaaS).

We recommend that you protect a deployed VM when it is powered on. 

To protect a VM with the disaster recovery service:

1. Select the VM and click the shield Enable DR protection button
   

The platform will register the VM for disaster recovery protection and display a shield symbol on the VM icon.

In the VM entity, the platform will set the VM drProtected attribute to true for use with the Abiquo API. 

To stop a VM from being protected by the disaster recovery service, click the crossed shield disable DR protection button.

An Abiquo instance is a new template that you create from VM disks.

Note:

• In Azure the Abiquo instance functionality has been disabled in Abiquo 4.7.0 pending further development.

To create an Abiquo instance, do these steps:

1. Select and shut down each VM that you want to copy, then click Create instance
   
2. Select a VM from the dialog
   
3. Enter a Name that will enable you to identify the new template
4. Optionally select the VM disks to save to a new template in the template library. If no disks are selected, the instance will copy all disks
5. To create more instances, select Keep window open
6. Click Create instance. The platform will lock the VM to create the instance
   
7. If you kept the dialog open, click Back to list and create more instances as required, then close the dialog

The platform will store your new templates in the Apps library.

• In vCloud Director, when you create an instance template from a multi-disk VM, the template will be correctly created in vCloud with all of the disks. The platform will display only one disk with the sum of the sizes of all the disks. It will also display only one disk when you create a VM from the template. When you deploy the VM, the Broker will correctly detect the disks and display them on the VM details Storage panel.
• In Amazon, 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.

Use a saved template in private cloud

To use an instance template in a VM, select the original template, which will be marked with an M symbol.

An instance menu will open. Select the instance template.

To display all VMs of your enterprise, go to Virtual datacenters → All virtual datacenters → Virtual machines tab.

To display all the VMs in a specific virtual datacenter, select the Virtual datacenter.

To move between icon and grid view, click the icon symbol or the grid symbol in the top right hand corner.

Icon view

Grid view

To filter VMs by text in the VM name, enter text in the Search box, with wildcards as required. See Search for VMs and filter the search

Remember that the VM usually has the format ABQ_xxx.

To filter the VMs by other values, such as the VM labels, click the filter button and enter text from the VM details . 

To delete a VM, move the mouse over the VM and from the VM options menu, select Delete.

If the virtual appliance or VM is deployed, you do not need to undeploy it. You can directly delete a VM that is deployed, even if it is powered on.

In private cloud, to create VMs that will always deploy on separate hypervisor hosts, use anti-affinity layers. Each VM in a layer will deploy on a different hypervisor host. 

Abiquo does not support layers that intersect with other layers. For example, this means that if you have two layers, a VM in the second layer may deploy on the same physical machine as a VM in the first layer.

Ideally you should design and implement your layers before you deploy your VMs.

Before you begin: 

• Design your layers:

1. • You cannot rename a layer when there are deployed VMs in the layer
   • You cannot move a deployed machine into a layer with a VM deployed on the same hypervisor

To create a layer:

1. Click the Add a layer button 
2. Enter the layer name.
3. Add VMs to the layer 

Layers ensure that VMs deploy on separate hypervisors, so the following rules apply:

If the deploy of a virtual appliances with layers fails, it may be because there are not enough physical machines available in your virtual datacenter. Or some physical machines may be reserved for specific enterprises, for example. Check with your system administrator.

You can only make changes to layers that will not compromise anti-affinity while your VMs are deployed or running.

To change the name of a layer:

1. Check that all the VMs in the layer are not deployed, which means they are in the NOT_ALLOCATED state. For example, they are new in a virtual appliance that is deployed or they are in a virtual appliance that has been undeployed.
2. Next to the layer name, click the pencil Edit button. 
3. Enter the new layer name

To remove a VM that is not deployed from an anti-affinity layer, drag the machine outside the layer and into the general VM area

To remove one or more deployed VMs from a layer:

1. Shut down the VMs 
   • You do not have to wait for each one to finish shutting down before moving to the next one
2. One by one, drag each VM out of the layer into the general VM area

To delete a layer:

1. Power off all the VMs
2. Remove all the VMs except one from the layer
3. Delete the layer

The layer will be deleted and the VM will be moved to the general VM area. 

To move deployed VMs between layers, you must move the VM out of one layer before you move it into another.  You cannot move a deployed VM directly from one layer to another.

To move a deployed VM to a different layer:

1. Power off the VM
2. Move the VM to the general VM area
3. If the new layer does not already exist, create the new layer
4. Add the VM to the new layer

On the Home view dashboard, the Metrics tab provides a general view of the resources currently being used by your virtual datacenters, as well as events.

The Enterprise resources - virtual datacenters panel shows statistics of the resources used by your virtual datacenters. Select the virtual datacenter name from the pull-down list

Key to the graph:

• Blue: Used resources
• Orange: Soft limit
• Red: Hard limit

The Metrics tables give you an overview of your virtual resources in the cloud platform. 

To open the Events view, click on the events icon on the main menu bar. 

To add new events as they arrive, select the Update automatically checkbox. Otherwise, you must refresh the list manually. 

To display the event details in the panel below the Event list, double-click on an Event. 

Some users may not be allowed to view events. If the events you expected to display do not appear in Events view, check with your system administrator.

An event in the platform has the following attributes:

To make it easier to find a specific event, use the filter tool.

1. Click the filter button  at the top right of Events view. 
2. Enter your filter criteria as described in the table below and click Accept. 

To remove the filter, click Clear at the bottom of the popup.

When events are filtered, the text  (events filtered)  will be displayed next to the filter button.

This example shows events from deallocating a hard disk.

To filter alarm events by name, enter the friendly name of the alarm in the "Message" field of the filter. Note that the Name field contains the UUID of the alarm.

To display all events related to an event, select the event, copy the context ID and filter by context.

When you view the event detail, the platform will display the  Context  of the event. The context is an ID that the platform assigns to each event in a group of related events. For example, if you undeploy a virtual appliance, the platform will create events for the undeploy of each VM, the destruction of the related hard disks, and the release of the NICs. And the platform will assign the context ID to each of these events.

To display all the events related to an event, select the Event from the list, from the details view, copy the Context ID and filter by Context.

Events on the cloud platform are classified into three severity categories: info, warning and error.