Configure a VM before you deploy

To configure your VM before you launch it, do the following steps:

1. On the VM icon, click on the options menu button

2. From the menu, select Edit 

3. Configure your VM as described below 

Open

From the VM icon, edit a VM

General configuration

To configure the VM with a basic general configuration, optionally change the following:

1. The platform will use the Name in the provider. The platform will power on the VMs in alphanumeric order of name. If a provider does not support duplicate names, such as vCenter, Abiquo will add the first available number in parentheses after the name, for example, MY_TEMPLATE_NAME (5). Check your provider documentation for allowed characters in VM names

2. Guest setup in private cloud. If your template supports it, you can request a Guest initial password that will be sent to your user Phone number by SMS or your Email address

3. Fully qualified domain name that the platform will set at deploy time

4. Hardware profile and/or CPU, RAM and Cores per socket

5. Description

6. Icon URL

To enable remote access to the VM in private cloud:

1. Select the Enable remote access check-box

2. Optionally display and change the password for the remote access connection. Note down the password. 

3. Before you deploy, remember that for SSH access, your user account must have a Public key. And you will need the SSH private key to log in to your VM.

Open

Edit a VM with General details

You can now continue with further configuration or Save and deploy your VM.

Network

If you don't add any IP addresses, the platform will automatically add one on the default network.

To configure IP addresses on your VM, do these steps:

1. Select the Private, External, or Public tab

2. For private or external networks, select the network

3. Create NICs as required:

   • To use an existing IP address, drag it into the NICs list

   • To request an automatically created NIC and IP in a private network, drag the Automatically generated IP label into the NICs list

   • For private networks, to create a new IP address and NIC, click the + add button

   • For public networks, to obtain a new IP address, click Purchase public IPs, select the network, and select the IP address

4. Select the Default gateway address

5. Continue configuring your VM or click Save to finish

Storage

In private cloud (and some public cloud providers), you may be able to create additional hard disks that are not persistent. This means that when you undeploy the VM or remove the hard disks, the platform will delete your hard disks and destroy all data on them. To save the contents of a hard disk, create an instance template, which is a copy of the VM hard disk/s in the template library.

To select a storage service level for the system disk:

1. Go to Storage

2. Select the first disk in the VM and click the pencil edit button

3. Select an appropriate datastore tier and click Save

To add a hard disk:

1. At the bottom of the Storage tab, click the + add button

2. Select Assign virtual disk

3. The disk options will depend on the platform configuration

   1. You must enter the Size and the Controller type

   2. Advanced options: to force the creation of a new SCSI Controller, assign a new Bus value. The platform will return the bus value assigned by the provider

   3. Select the Datastore tier with the appropriate storage service level

   4. Click Save

Storage volumes are persistent, which means they will still be available in your virtual datacenter after you undeploy the VM. 

Firewall policies

Select the Firewall policies to add. You can add as many firewall policies as necessary, up to the cloud provider's limit. If you can't see the expected policies, you may need to synchronize with your provider or wait for the platform to update provider data.

Load balancers

Select the Load balancers to use for the VM.

Monitoring

To enable monitoring and metrics do these steps:

1. Select the Fetch metrics checkbox, which will retrieve all metrics from the provider

2. Select from the available options for your provider, for example, for AWS, you can select Basic or Advanced monitoring

3. Select the metrics you would like to display for your VM