Manage virtual appliances

Introduction to 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.

Display virtual appliances

To display virtual appliances:

1. On the main menu, click the cloud icon to go to myCloud view

2. Click the cloud button to open the Virtual datacenters section

3. Select All or select a virtual datacenter

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

Open

To change between Cards view and List view, click the buttons in the top right-hand corner of the screen

Open

Virtual appliances list view

Create a virtual appliance

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

   1. Optionally, enter a URL for the Icon. The URL may contain the IP address of the API server. Use the same protocol as the server to avoid mixed content errors.
      The icon can be a PNG, JPG, or GIF image. For best results use square icon images with a size of 128x128 pixels and a transparent background.

5. Click Save  

Now you can add VMs to the virtual appliance and deploy them in the cloud.

For more details, see Manage virtual machines

For details of how to create a virtual appliance based on a spec, see Manage virtual appliances with blueprint specs.

Deploy a virtual appliance

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.

Display metrics for a virtual appliance

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

To display the metrics of the VMs in the virtual appliance,

1. Open the virtual appliance

2. 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, stat

For details of how to create and display custom metrics for a virtual appliance, see Use collectd plugin for custom metrics.

Add tags to a virtual appliance

To manage tags for a virtual appliance: 

1. Go to Virtual appliances → Edit a virtual appliance→ Tags

2. Add tags as described below

For entities that exist in the platform only, such as virtual appliances, the user can create tags in the platform only.

To add a tag, enter the Key and Value, then click Add. 

To edit a tag field, click the pencil edit button 

To delete a tag, select the tag, then click the trash bin delete button.

To save your changes, click Save.

Copy or move a virtual appliance in a datacenter

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.

• You cannot move or copy a VApp with a captured VM that has no template in the Catalogue

• You cannot move or copy a VApp with a VM that does not have a compatible template or conversion for a new hypervisor

• You can only move a VApp with a persistent VM, you cannot copy it

Manage virtual appliances using the API

For the Abiquo API documentation of this feature, see Abiquo API Resources and the page for this resource VirtualApplianceResource.

See also the API How tos, for example: API create virtual datacenters and virtual machines how to

Undeploy a virtual appliance

Before you begin:

1. If the virtual appliance is not synchronized with the hypervisor or cloud provider, first:

   • Remove any 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.

Delete a virtual appliance

Before you begin:

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

To delete a virtual appliance:

1. Go to myCloud → Virtual datacenters

2. Select a virtual appliance

3. Click the trash bin delete button

The platform will delete the virtual appliance and all the VMs.

Pages related to virtual appliances

• Working with VMs

  • Manage VMs

  • Configure VMs

  • Monitoring and Control and Scaling

  • To create VMs with high availability using anti-affinity layers, see Manage VM high availability

• To administer virtual resources, see the Related pages section of myCloud view