Manage Virtual Machines

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 obtain a pricing estimate for deploying a complete virtual appliance now:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances and open a virtual appliance
2. Click the $ Estimate button. The Estimate button will have code for your currency or the default $ dollar symbol.

• The pricing message may also display when you deploy the virtual appliance. 
• API users can also request a pricing message through the API. 

The virtual appliance and VM pricing estimates only include the costs that are directly related to VMs. The virtual datacenters resources estimate includes other costs such as the VLAN cost, and the cost of datastore disks without a datastore tier, such as a cloud-init ISO. The VDC resources cost also includes public IP addresses because they are billed for the time of reservation, which may be longer than the time they are attached to a VM.

Screenshot: pricing estimate button

This screenshot shows an example pricing message.

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.

After you create and deploy some VMs, close your virtual appliance:

1. Click on the Virtual datacenter name in the top left hand corner of the screen. Or click on the myCloud Virtual datacenters button.
   

The platform will close the virtual appliance and return to the Virtual datacenters view.

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 quickly create and/or deploy a VM from anywhere on the platform:

1. Click the orange +VM button at the bottom right of any screen
   
2. Enter a Name, which will be the VM Label
3. Select a virtual datacenter or create a new one
   1. When you create a VDC in Amazon, remember to wait while AWS creates a default firewall because you must add a firewall to the VM
4. Select a virtual appliance or create a new one
5. Select a template
   
   

You can now deploy directly, or automatically go to the virtual appliance, in order to edit the VM.

It is also possible to open the advanced configuration before you deploy.

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 . 

On screens with lists, the platform offers a search box. It may also offer a filter button, to open a filter dialog with text boxes.

• Enter a text string and the platform will retrieve all entities with that string in their text fields
• OR Enter a text containing one or more wildcard asterisk characters.

For example, in Virtual datacenters view on the Virtual Machines tab, without entering any text, the platform will display all the VMs in the user's tenant.

To filter by VM name, enter characters that are in the VM Name (the friendly name entered by the user or the name of the VM template 

• Entering "Server" in the Virtual machine name text box retrieves the VMs with "Server" in their name. This is the same as entering "*Server*"
  

• To clear the Virtual machine name filter, click the x
• Entering "*1" only displays the VMs with "1" at the end of the name. You can also use a wildcard at the end of the text
• You can filter on special characters, e.g. "("
  
• To filter by the following fields, click the funnel Filter button and enter filter text.
  
  
  • UUID
  • Fully qualified domain name
  • Virtual datacenter
  • Virtual appliance
  • Provider ID
• To remove the filter, click the Clearlink  

To move a VM to another VApp in the same virtual datacenter:

1. Select the VM

2. On the VM control panel, click the VM move button
   

3. Select the virtual appliance or create a new one, and click Accept

If you have the privilege to restrict VMs, you may also be able to move the VM to a restricted VApp in the same virtual datacenter. 

When you move a VM to a restricted virtual appliance, your administrator or platform provider will control the VM. Your provider may offer this as an option to Outsource a VM.

To move a VM to a restricted virtual appliance:

1. Click the VM move button on the VM control panel

2. Select the option to Move the VM to a restricted VApp OR select a restricted VApp from the list, or create a new Vapp
   
   

    Click here to show/hide the screenshot

   

   
   

You can move a deployed VM to a virtual datacenter within the same Abiquo datacenter. The target VDC must have the same hypervisor type. If the VM is not deployed, the Move VM button will allow you to Move the VM to another virtual appliance in the same virtual datacenter.

To move a deployed VM to another VDC:

1. If your VM does not support hot-reconfigure, shut down the VM. This is because moving a VM will change the configuration of the VM, for example, the NICs
2. Select the VM and on the control panel, beside the Undeploy VM button, click the cross-arrows VM move button
   
3. For a deployed VM, the platform will display a list of compatible virtual datacenters (with the same hypervisor technology and network device) and virtual appliances.
   Select the virtual datacenter and virtual appliance
   
4. After you select the virtual appliance, the platform will display the Move VM General information so you can confirm the details
5. Select at least one network address and gateway. It is possible to select the same external IP address that was already attached to the VM. 
   
6. Optionally select firewalls and load balancers
7. The platform may display a pricing estimate dialog for you to accept the new VM price.

The platform will move the VM to the new virtual datacenter. If the move is not successful, the VM will be restored to the original virtual datacenter.

Limitations

This feature does not move VMs with the following configuration:

• External storage volumes
• NAT rules
• Scaling groups
• Anti-affinity layers. 
  • The platform will attempt to remove the VM from its layer and if it cannot do so, then the move will fail. For more details of layer constraints, see Configure VM High Availability. The platform will not add the VM to a layer in the target VDC.
• Disaster recovery protection

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.