Abiquo Architecture

The Abiquo cloud platform integrates with your existing technology and enterprise systems. It allows you to manage and control virtual resources. Users have self-service access to the appliance library of virtual machine templates to deploy their virtual machines within the resource limits set by the administrators.

Using Abiquo's plugin and integration architecture, you can create your own unique cloud offering.

Three important components of the Abiquo Architecture are the Abiquo User Interface, Orchestrator and Remote Services.

The Abiquo orchestrator module has several components

Users can access the Abiquo platform through the GUI using a browser, or as a third-party interface. They can download templates from the external virtual image provider and deploy them onto the virtualized hardware. The Abiquo platform basically consists of the Abiquo Server, Abiquo Remote Services and the relational database (included with the Abiquo Server). The Abiquo platform interacts with the hypervisors to manage the virtualized hardware for the users.

Services

A guide to the Services used by the Abiquo platform.

• Tomcat: Abiquo server program.
• DHCP Server: Used to dynamically manage the network. Note that Abiquo recommends the use of a separate DHCP Relay Server.
• Mail Server: Used to send emails.
• Rabbit MQ: Queue program used to manage queues for each datacenter.
• MariaDB (or MySQL): Database to store Abiquo platform data.
• Redis: Used to store subscriptions for virtual machine monitoring.

Apache Tomcat

Abiquo Server program.

DHCP and DHCP Relay

In Abiquo, you can assign IP addresses directly to a VM template to deploy the VM with this network configuration, and the DHCP server will bind the MAC and IP addresses. 

Abiquo supports DHCP using OMAPI or dnsmasq and the DHCP server is optional.

When you configure the platform to use a network management system, such as VMware NSX, the platform will use its DHCP servers, with the platform server for fallback. To allow VMs to obtain their IP addresses from a DHCP server or other means outside the platform, connect them to unmanaged networks in Abiquo. 

The built-in DHCP Server usually only serves leases to machines created in Abiquo, so it should not affect the rest of your infrastructure. However, as a security measure Abiquo recommends that you configure your firewall to filter the traffic from this server outside of the cloud platform. When using the DHCP server with OMAPI, the server may require one VNIC for each VLAN that it is listening on, so in a large environment, you may need to use a DHCP relay server.

Mail Server

Used to send emails to the owners of physical and virtual machines.

RabbitMQ

Queue program used to manage queues for each datacenter. 

Redis

Used to store subscriptions for virtual machine monitoring. 

NFS 

NFS Services are used to share virtual machine templates in the Appliance Library with cloud nodes and the Abiquo Server. For obvious security reasons, you should forbid access to the server providing the NFS share except to the cloud nodes and the Abiquo server.