Cloud bursting and automation in hybrid cloud

To help you detect and address changing demand for resources, the platform's Control features include monitoring alerts with notifications, action plans for automation, and autoscaling. Abiquo 4.4 has a new Control view where you can manage Alerts and Action plans.

This page describes how you can use the control features, for example for cloud bursting, which means automatically deploying new resources in any part of your hybrid cloud environment to meet a peak in demand for resources.

Prepare your virtual datacenters

The first step to cloud bursting and automation is to create and configure your VMs and networks in virtual datacenters.

For information about creating and configuring VMs in Abiquo, see Manage Virtual Machines.

If you are going to use a VPN between two virtual datacenters, you will probably want to connect two networks with different addresses. For the first site, you could use the default network. For the second site, at least create a virtual datacenter with a custom network (see Manage Virtual Datacenters or create an additional network for use by the VPNs. For information about how to create additional private networks and how to set a new default network, see Manage Networks. For information about using VPNs, see Connect virtual networks with VPNaaS

When you configure your VMs to add network interfaces and storage, you should also and enable metrics. See VM monitoring and metrics.

Define scaling groups for VMs

To scale out a VM, define a scaling group for the base VM. The base VM can be deployed or undeployed.

See Manage Scaling Groups

Deploy your VMs

After you have prepared the VMs and networks and defined scaling groups, you can now deploy your VMs and after a short time the platform will fetch metrics for these VMs.

To display the metrics of the VMs and scaling groups in a virtual appliance, go to the Monitoring tab. 

Create alarms for metrics across the cloud

An alarm activates when a metric passes a certain threshold. If you imagine a dashboard for your metrics, alarms are like red lights that light up when conditions change, for example, when there is a problem. 

You can create alarms for metrics across the platform, including built-in VM metrics, or scaling group metrics, or custom metrics (see Custom Metrics Resources).

To create each alarm, you will need to select an entity, a metric and a metric statistic. See Alarms across the cloud 

To create alarms, go to an Alarms tab in either the Virtual datacenters view (see Manage cloud alarms) or the Infrastructure view (see Infrastructure Alarms).

To work with auto-scaling, we recommend that you create alarms for both the high threshold, when you will require more resources, and the low threshold, when these resources can be retired.

Create alerts to notify and trigger action plans

Alerts enable you to configure notifications or actions for the VMs in a virtual appliance. Alerts are like a worker monitoring a group of alarms; when all the lights for the group are lit up, the alert is activated. Alerts can notify users and trigger action plans.

You can create an alert for any group of alarms in the platform from the Control view. See Manage Alerts

To work with auto-scaling, you may wish to create alerts that notify the need for more resources, and alerts that notify when these resources are no longer needed.

Create action plans for cloud bursting and other automated tasks

An action plan is a sequence of actions to run on the platform in general, VMs, and/or scaling groups. An action plan is run by a trigger, which can be an alert or a schedule.

You can create an action plan from the Control view. See Manage Action Plans

For example, you can now create an action plan to with scaling actions to add more VMs for your application, as well as one to retire VMs when they are no longer required.

After you save an action plan, you can add an alert to trigger the plan or create a schedule to run it.