How to edit VM cost codes, lock and protect VMs, relocate a VM, troubleshoot VM launch, manage VMs with workflow feature, and perform power operations with the API on the hybrid cloud platform.
Edit virtual machine cost codes
Protect a VM
Reset VM password
Restrict virtual appliances and VMs
To restrict a VM by moving it to a restricted VApp:
Click the VM move button on the VM control panel
To move a VM to a restricted virtual appliance, the user can do one of the following depending on their privileges:
Select the option to Move the VM to a restricted VApp
Select a restricted VApp from the list
Create a new restricted VApp.
Relocate a deployed VM to another host
The relocate VM feature enables you to move a deployed VM to another hypervisor on the same rack with the same manager. This feature is available for VMware ESXi and uses the vMotion feature. This feature requires the "Relocate a VM into a compatible host" privilege. The Relocate VM button is on the VM control panel near the Protect VM padlock button.
Privileges: Relocate a VM into a compatible host
To relocate a VM:
Go to Virtual datacenters → open a virtual appliance → go to Virtual machines → select a VM
On the VM control panel on the lower right-hand side of the screen, click the Relocate VM button
The platform will display a dialog with a list of hypervisor hosts where you can relocate the VM
Click the Show details link to display the host metrics and the Relocate button
Select the host with the same manager where you wish to relocate the VM, go to the host section and click Relocate. The platform will display the VM status as Relocating
After relocation, the new hypervisor location will display in the control panel, for example, with a new Remote access address. If you click the Relocate button again, you should see a different host list, including the original host.
Screenshot: Select the VM and click relocate
Screenshot: Host selection list
Screenshot: Host metrics and Relocate button
Screenshot: You can check the relocation by clicking the Relocate button again, which will show the original host as a new candidate
What happens when the user clicks deploy?
The VM scheduler deploys the VM.
A simplified description of the deploy process is shown in the following diagram.
Deploy errors
When an error occurs during a VM deploy, the platform displays one or more of the following:
A yellow warning or red error notification message
An error state on the VM icon
A VM warning symbol in the lower part of the VM icon.
The user and the administrator may be notified of the error.
The user can click on the error icon to display the events and the user can click on an event in the list to display its tracer message.
The platform displays the full details of an error in the Events view and on the Events panel in the Home view.
Here is an example of an event for a failed reconfigure.
Source: Abiquo / admin / Date/time: 2014-4-29 13:41:41 Action: VIRTUAL_MACHINE_DEPLOY Performed by: admin User: admin Trace: There are 1 candidate machines but all are oversubscribed by the current workload rules (RAM and CPU oversubscription or no suitable datastore with enough free space). Please check the workload rules or the physical machine resources. Virtual machine requires 1 CPU -- 128 RAM Candidate machines : BCN_KVM_02 ip - 10.60.13.20 . Severity: ERROR
The VM warning symbol is based on the VM task state. The VM tasks are a collection of jobs. For example, a Deploy task includes jobs to allocate, configure, and power on the VM. If a job fails, then the task will also fail and the platform will display the warning symbol on the VM.
To acknowledge and delete a warning symbol, click on the symbol to remove it.
If your user role is an administrator role with the privilege to "Manage Users", then you can also delete warnings for the users of the enterprises that you manage.
Virtual machine states table
Virtual appliance states
Manage workflow tasks
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
Go to Virtual datacenters → Workflow tasks.
To filter workflow tasks, enter text in the filter box at the top of the tasks list.
To continue a queued workflow task, click the Accept link beside the task.
To cancel a queued workflow task, click the Reject link beside the task
Retrieve a VM using the API
This section describes how to retrieve a virtual machine with the REST API.
Before you begin, create a VM with the Abiquo UI and power it off. Open the browser console. This example uses Chrome, so we clicked F12.
Select the Network view
Click the red arrow record button and the clear button next to it
In the platform on the VM control panel, click the Start button
Scroll up to the first request, which should be a PUT request to the virtual machine state URL. Click on the request
If you can't see the Method column, right click on a column heading and select Method from the list
Select the link to the VM up to the end of the VM ID number (before "/state")
Use a cURL request similar to the one the example below or a REST API tool such as Postman to perform a GET request to this link. For this basic testing, you can use the -k option to avoid security warnings.
To manage the virtual machine using the API, first you need to retrieve the virtual machine and find the links for different actions. Remember to see VirtualMachinesResource for full details of virtual machine operations using the Abiquo API.
