Manage Virtual Appliances

A virtual appliance is like a folder that contains a group of one or more virtual machines (VMs). These VMs may be related and you can use them together to provide a service. You can manage each VM separately or deploy all the VMs in the virtual appliance together.  You must create VMs within virtual appliances. The Virtual appliances tab has a cards view and a list view.

To create a new virtual appliance to hold a group of VMs do these steps:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters
2. Select a virtual datacenter
3. At the bottom of the screen, click the + add button
4. If a menu displays, select "Create virtual appliance" and complete the form as described here
5. Click Save  

For more details see GUI Create virtual appliance

Now you can add VMs to the virtual appliance and deploy it.

To create a virtual appliance based on a blueprint of a saved configuration:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances
2. Click Create a virtual appliance and select Create virtual appliance based on spec. 

3. Click on a spec icon. Change the Name to make it unique in your environment. Then click select

    Click here to show/hide the screenshot

   
   

   

4. The virtual appliance spec validation dialog will open. Move through the tabs and check or edit information as required
   
   • General information
   • Private networks: Create new networks or select existing ones
   • External networks: In vCloud, specs have basic support for external networks. The validation process will list the network, and you can select it and then continue with the process. The platform will create the VApp correctly. Remember to ensure that there are enough external IP addresses available for the new virtual appliance
   • Load balancers: Select a new algorithm and public or private addresses that are compatible with your provider
   • Templates: Select new templates to replace ones that are not available in your environment
   • VMs: Select and view, and if necessary, edit the VM configuration
   • Errors: The Errors tab only displays when there are errors that cannot be fixed within the spec. For example, you may be able to replace a template with another one of the same name, but if there is no similar template, Abiquo will not create a virtual appliance. In this case, Abiquo displays the Errors tab.
5. After you have finished editing the virtual appliance, click Save

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.

When workflow is enabled, the user's requests to deploy, reconfigure and undeploy VMs will be held with the status waiting to be reviewed. 

This can include actions on scaling groups, unless the administrator selects the option to disable workflow in the scaling group. 

To view the list of workflow tasks

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Workflow tasks.

To filter workflow tasks, enter text in the filter box at the top of the tasks list.

To display virtual appliances

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances
2. Change between Cards view and List view, using the selection symbols in the top right-hand corner of the screen

To filter virtual appliances, enter search text in the Search box

Card view

List view

Abiquo can display custom metrics for your virtual appliance and metrics for the group of VMs in the virtual appliance.

To display custom metrics for the virtual appliance:

• On a Virtual appliance card, click the Monitoring button OR
• Open a Virtual appliance and go to Monitoring tab → Virtual appliance metrics page.

To display the metrics of the VMs in the virtual appliance, select the Virtual machine metrics page

To configure the display of metrics:

• For the refresh interval, select the Refresh data every checkbox and enter a number of minutes. 
• To filter metric statistics, click on the Filter button and select the granularity, statistic, time frame, and dimension, as required.

To create custom metrics for a virtual appliance, use the Abiquo API or collectd.

• Custom metrics for the VMs in the virtual appliance will display on the Virtual machine metrics tab in the Virtual appliance.
• Custom metrics for the Virtual appliance will display on the Virtual appliance metrics tab in the Virtual appliance.

For details of how to create custom metrics using the API, see the following documentation:

• Custom Metrics Resources
• Use collectd plugin for custom metrics
• How to enable VM monitoring and metrics via API

To manage tags for a virtual appliance: 

1. Go to Virtual appliances → Edit a virtual appliance→ Tags
2. Add tags as described below

For more details see GUI Edit virtual appliance Tags

To create a virtual appliance spec to save a configuration:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Open the virtual appliance
2. Go to the virtual appliance options menu → select Create new spec
3. Enter spec details
4. Click Accept

The platform will create the new spec for your tenant. This spec will be the default, but an administrator can change or remove the default.

For more details see GUI Create new spec

When designing a virtual appliance for use in more than one location, please consider the following differences between private and public cloud:

• Private cloud datacenters allow multiple disk templates and additional disks. In public cloud, the platform may support only a single disk or use all disks
• Public networks in private cloud will be translated to floating IPs in public cloud and vice versa
• A range of IP addresses may be reserved by an SDN system or the cloud provider
• The number of NICs allowed or required per VM may vary
• Firewall and load balancer configurations may differ

To save VM disks as templates, see Create instances to save VM disks to templates.

Abiquo is a hypervisor-independent cloud platform because its V2V conversion process allows users to move or copy any undeployed virtual appliance between virtual datacenters in the same physical datacenter, regardless of whether they use the same or different hypervisors. The platform copies the template disks of the virtual appliance but not the network configuration. So you will need to recreate the network configuration after move or copy operations. You cannot copy virtual appliances with persistent disks.

To copy or move a virtual appliance in a datacenter:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances 
2. Select a virtual appliance that is not deployed.

• To Move, click on the crossed arrows move button of the virtual appliance icon, or the Name (in list mode), and drag it into the new virtual datacenter
• To Copy, hold down the SHIFT key, then click on the move button or the Name of the virtual appliance and drag it into the new virtual datacenter

Screenshot: Move a virtual appliance to another VDC in the same private cloud datacenter

Prerequisites for Move and Copy Operations

Before the copy or move process can be started, the platform evaluates each VM in the virtual appliance for its template type and the availability of conversions.

Before you begin:

1. If the virtual appliance is not synchronized with the hypervisor or cloud provider, first:
   • remove the undeployed VMs OR 
   • individually undeploy the deployed VMs OR
   • deploy all VMs

To undeploy a virtual appliance, which will destroy all VMs and hard disks on the hypervisor datastore:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → select Virtual appliance
2. Click the Undeploy button on the right-hand side of the screen. 

If you redeploy the virtual appliance, the platform will make a fresh copy of the template disks.

Before you begin:

1. Undeploy the virtual appliance, which will destroy the VMs

To delete a virtual appliance:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → select virtual appliance
2. Click the  delete button

The platform will delete the virtual appliance and all the VMs