Glossary

Base format

The platform's default template format for each hypervisor. See Template compatibility table#Hypervisor Compatibility Table

Captured virtual machine

A VM that was created in a hypervisor outside of Abiquo and retrieved by Abiquo, then captured. Abiquo can manage captured VMs in the same way as VMs created in Abiquo. See Import and capture virtual machines.

Catalogue

The Catalogue is the centralized library for software templates, blueprint, and services. Users can create VMs from the templates available in the catalogue. The catalogue was previously called the Apps library, Appliance library, or Application library.

Cloud

Datacenters and providers that offer pay-as-you-go, scalable, and flexible virtual infrastructure (compute, network and storage) as a service to final users

Datacenter

A group of physical machines on the same LAN (Local Area Network). These machines are usually located in the same place, and share a network and resources (e.g. electrical power)

Datacenter networks

Networks that are created at datacenter level: external, public and unmanaged networks.

Default network

Network that can be set for an enterprise (external, private) or virtual datacenter (public, external, private). If the user does not create a network configuration, the platform will create one using the default network.

Deploy

The process of allocating, provisioning and powering on a VM. Also called launching a VM.

Enterprise

An enterprise is a cloud tenant. So an enterprise could be a third-party company, development group, company department, and so on. All the users in an enterprise can access the same virtual infrastructure. Each enterprise has its own partition in the Catalogue.

Excluded network

You can use an Excluded network to reserve a network address range in a private cloud datacenter, to prevent users from creating private networks that use that range.

Hard limit

The maximum amount of resources that are available to an enterprise or virtual datacenter, for example, RAM, CPU, hard disk.

Hypervisor

A virtualization platform enabling the creation of different VMs on the same physical machine.

Instance

See Virtual Machine Instance

Managed networks

VM networks that receive their IP addresses from Abiquo, including: private, external and public networks.

Onboard

The platform can synchronize public cloud regions to onboard VMs and other resources that were created outside of Abiquo in public cloud providers

Persistent virtual machine template

To create a persistent VM template, the platform copies the system disk of a VM template to a volume of external storage, so that system disk data persists after the VM is undeployed

Physical machine
or cloud node

A physical machine, cloud node, or host has a hypervisor running on it in order to provide a virtualization infrastructure

Reconfigure

To change the VM configuration after deployment. If your VM does not support hot reconfigure, you must power it first in order to reconfigure it. Elements that can be changed during a reconfigure include: network interfaces and volumes.

Scope

An access list of enterprises and/or datacenters

Soft limit

When the user reaches the soft limit for a resource, the system alerts the user that they are near the absolute limit of a resource, called the hard limit.

Synchronized

When VMs are synchronized, the VM states are the same in Abiquo and in the hypervisor or public cloud region. To synchronize VMs, Abiquo obtains information about the VMs from the hypervisor or provider and updates the information about the VMs in Abiquo.

Template repository
was Remote repository

A public or private repository of virtual machine templates. Descriptions and virtual machine disk files are served by HTTP.

Tenant

In Abiquo, cloud tenants are known as enterprises.

Undeploy

The process of destroying the VM in the hypervisor and releasing resources on the platform.

Unavailable VM template

An unavailable VM template in private cloud is a template with no disk file. In public cloud it is a template that is in the Abiquo Catalogue (template details cache) but not available in the cloud provider. Users cannot deploy this template. Administrators can replace the disk file to make the template available again or when the template is no longer in use, they can delete it from the Catalogue.

Users

Users of the platform are grouped into tenants, which may be organizations, departments, and so on. Each user has a role with a group of privileges to allow the user to work with platform features.

VApp spec

A VApp spec is a configuration blueprint saved from a virtual appliance. Users can easily create a new virtual appliance from a VApp spec. A VApp spec is an abbreviation for "virtual appliance specification".

Virtual appliance

A virtual appliance (VApp) is a group of VMs running in a virtual datacenter. The virtual appliance can contain a related set of VMs that are used to provide a service, for example, a web stack. At the virtual appliance level, you can deploy these VMs together, view their performance statistics, create anti-affinity layers for VM high availability, and so on.

Virtual Datacenter

A partitioned area of the cloud with a set of virtual resources that belongs to one tenant and may be controlled by the tenant administrator (limit resources, create volumes, obtain public IP addresses, etc). The virtual resources are available to administrators and users on a self-service basis. The virtual appliances in a virtual datacenter all use the same type of virtualization technology (hypervisor, public cloud provider). These virtual appliances are all in the same public cloud region or physical datacenter and rack. See Manage virtual datacenters

Virtual datacenter networks

Networks created at virtual datacenter level: private networks that are isolated within the virtual datacenter.

Virtual machine

A guest or virtual machine (VM) is an instance of a virtual image with network and storage configurations. On a hypervisor it can be understood as a virtual operating system instance. One physical machine with a hypervisor installed can host various VMs.

Virtual machine instance

An Abiquo virtual machine instance is a copy of the selected disks of a deployed VM. To create a VM instance, the platform copies selected VM disks and saves them as a new template in the Catalogue.

Virtual machine template
(also Virtual image in API)

A VM template contains the disk files that the platform will use to create a VM and the definition of the VM. In public cloud, the platform only stores the VM definition and it uses the disk files in the provider.