Manage enterprise credentials and properties

1 Add public cloud credentials for a tenant
2 Create a user to access the cloud provider portal
3 Set enterprise properties to store tenant metadata
4 Inject enterprise properties as VM variables

This page describes how to add credentials, such as public cloud credentials, and configure enterprise properties for cloud tenants.
For details of how to create and modify tenants, see Manage enterprises.
For details of how to set limits and resource access in Allowed datacenters and public cloud regions, see Configure an enterprise in a cloud location.
For details of how to predefine enterprise properties in the UI, see Predefine enterprise properties for the UI
For a table of the enterprise properties used for public cloud and integrations, see Enterprise properties general table
For details of how to configure an application for OAuth, see Add an application for OAuth

Add public cloud credentials for a tenant

To work with a public cloud region, each enterprise should have its own public cloud account for each cloud provider. All the users in the tenant will work with this same account.

Privileges: Manage provider credentials

Before you begin:

Obtain credentials to access the cloud provider's API. For Abiquo's basic guides, see Obtain public cloud credentials. Always check your provider documentation too.

To add public cloud credentials:

Go to Users → select and edit enterprise → Credentials → Public
Enter the Credentials as described here
1. Select the Provider: Some providers may require different credentials for groups of regions
2. Enter the credentials as described in the table below
3. If the customer account is under a provider partner account and will not have compute access, select Only for billing.
  For a standalone customer account, see Add a customer AWS account for billing only.
Click Add account. The platform will validate your credentials with the cloud provider and save them
Finish editing the enterprise and click Save

This will add a cloud provider account for a tenant enterprise with access to a public cloud region.

In resellers with Amazon, Azure ARM, and other partner accounts, to create a customer account in the provider and add it to an enterprise in the platform, click the enterprise building Create account button. See Create an account in public cloud for the customer of a reseller.

Public cloud credentials table

Attribute	Description
Compute Compute access
Access key ID	For compute access, identity to access the cloud provider API. For example, a username, API access key ID, subscription ID and certificate, or another account identifier. For Azure, the format is subscription-id#app-id#tenant-id For Google the format is project_id#client_id#client_email#private_key_id For OCI, the format is tenancy#user#fingerprint
Secret access key	Key to access the cloud provider API. For example, an API key or other API credential. For Azure, enter the password for the app. For OCI enter the private key in PEM format.
Also use for pricing	Use this credential to access pricing data in the provider and for cost usage data for billing dashboards. For example, to get hardware profile prices from AWS or to obtain billing data from OCI. For Azure, add a separate pricing credential in a different format. The API user must have pricing and billing permissions in the provider
Billing only
Only for billing	If your customer is part of your reseller hierarchy AND their public cloud account is under your reseller or partner account AND they do not require compute access, then mark this checkbox AND enter the Access key ID as follows: For Azure, the format is subscription-id##tenant-id For AWS, the format is account-id For these customers, for the Secret access key, you can enter a random string

Create a user to access the cloud provider portal

When your enterprise has credentials for a public cloud provider, you can create a user account in a cloud provider. From here you can also click a link to access the cloud provider portal.

Abiquo displays the public cloud account identifiers on the Credentials tab.

Privileges: Manage user creation in provider

To create a user:

Go to Users → Edit enterprise
Go to Credentials
For a provider with credentials that supports user creation, click Create user.
The platform will send the following to the cloud provider:
- Details from your user account, including the username and email
- An automatically generated password
  - The administrator can configure the generation of the password with the "abiquo.guest.password.length" and "abiquo.guest.password.exclude" properties.
The platform will create an event with the enterprise ID, user ID, user email, date/time, and cloud provider.
The user in the provider will have the following permissions:
- Azure: built-in Owner role.
- AWS: in the same groups as the current user.
- vCloud: by default the same as the current user, so usually an Organization Administrator
  - The administrator can configure the role to assign with the "abiquo.vcd.org.userRoleName" property
The platform displays the user credentials only once and it does not store these credentials
To access the cloud provider portal, click user portal link or portal link
- If you click portal link, on the Edit enterprise dialog, then you will need to enter your account ID and password in the cloud provider

Set enterprise properties to store tenant metadata

To store tenant details and metadata, use enterprise properties. The platform also uses enterprise properties to configure features and integrations.

Enterprise properties can have different types to enable you to use properties in hierarchical organisation models (such as reseller models). Administrators can use types to reserve some properties for internal use, and enable reseller or enterprise admins to view or manage other properties.

The platform controls access to enterprise properties with the following privileges and types.

To retrieve or update enterprise properties in the user interface, you will require the Allow user to switch enterprise privilege.

As well as the regular administrator privileges to Manage enterprises and Manage users of all enterprises.

There are three types of enterprise properties:

Read/write
Read only
Hidden

To update Read only or Hidden properties you will also require the Manage enterprise properties privilege.

To store tenant details and metadata, by setting enterprise properties:

Go to Users → edit enterprise → Properties.
To add properties, enter a Key and Value for each property and click the Add button
- These fields have a maximum length of 255 characters each

To edit a property's Value, click the pencil edit button. And to delete a property, click the trash bin delete button.

To set default enterprises properties and values for your users, see Predefine enterprise properties for the UI.

For details of how to manage enterprise properties via the API, see Update enterprise properties via API.

To add tenant metadata to VMs, see Inject enterprise properties as VM variables.

Inject enterprise properties as VM variables

You can pass enterprise properties to VMs using cloud-init. An example use case for this feature is to call an external Windows License or AD server and automatically assign your VMs to the appropriate AD group when they deploy.

VM variables and template variables have priority over enterprise properties with the same name

To add enterprise properties as VM variables when you create your VMs:

Create an enterprise property with a Key called "vm_variables_csv"
For the Value, enter a list of regular expressions in CSV format
1. The platform will try to match the expression with each property key string.
  For example, for the following vm_variables_cv
  aa, bb.*, .*cc.*, .*dd
  the platform will create VM variables with any property that is
  - named "aa"
  - starts with "bb"
  - contains "cc"
  - ends with "dd"

The platform will create VMs with the selected VM variables.

Remember that users can edit the VM variables before they deploy the VMs.