Configure Discovery Manager checks

The Abiquo Discover Manager (NARS) is an Abiquo remote service. The Abiquo Infrastructure check verifies the platform infrastructure at intervals. It does this by connecting to all of the hypervisors on all of the Abiquo racks and all of the public cloud regions, and their VMs, to compare them against the information recorded in the Abiquo database.

It checks the following components of physical machines:

Virtual CPU
RAM
NICS
Datastores
Initiator IQN

Any changes are recorded in the Abiquo database.

You can configure the discovery manager as described below using the Abiquo Configuration Properties#nars.

Multiple threads

The Abiquo Discovery Manager has a pool of plugin-clients. Each plugin-client connection checks different machines in the infrastructure. You can configure the number of plugin-clients with abiquo properties. This number should be related to the number of cores of the server that is running discovery manager service.

Discarded Machines

If a physical machine cannot be contacted within the timeout period, it is discarded by the infrastructure check. Machines that are discarded are logged in the Abiquo logs (nars and catalina.out) with the message "not checked again".

Maximum Duration

The maximum duration of the infrastructure check is the same as the infrastructure check timeout value.

Delay Between Checks

After the check has completed, the Discovery Manager waits for the delay period before starting a new check. You can set the delay with abiquo properties. The default delay period is 5 minutes.

Check Frequency

The time between checks is equal to the duration of the check plus the delay between checks. So you may be able to increase the frequency of the infrastructure checks by decreasing the timeout value.

Configure Virtual System Monitor for public cloud

To ensure performance and scalability of the remote services in managing many public cloud regions, Abiquo introduced the following properties to tune the virtual system monitor (VSM remote service).

Polling frequency per cloud provider

You can configure the delay between VSM polling of virtual machines in milliseconds in a cloud provider plugin with the abiquo.vsm.pollingfrequency.<cloudprovider> property.

VM sync frequency per cloud provider

You can configure the delay between virtual machine synchronizer operations in milliseconds in a cloud provider plugin with the abiquo.vsm.vmsyncfrequency.<cloudprovider> property.

Actor creation delay

You can configure the delay in milliseconds added between the creation of actors for a cloud provider plugin type on VSM startup with the abiquo.vsm.actor.creation.delay.<cloudprovider> property.

Abiquo SaaS example

An example of values that could be used in a SaaS system.

abiquo.vsm.pollingfrequency.amazon = 600000

abiquo.vsm.vmsyncfrequency.amazon = 300000

abiquo.vsm.actor.creation.delay.amazon = 2500