Identify VMs with their provider ID

Abiquo 5.3 will now identify all deployed VMs by their provider ID. This will improve performance and management of VMs and save administrator time.

This means that Abiquo will not use the VM name to identify VMs in providers. If you use a template named webserver, then the default VM name will be webserver and when you deploy the VM, it will be named webserver in the provider. The Abiquo API does not usually validate VM name that the user supplies and it will directly display provider errors. But for example, in the case of duplicate names in ESXi, when Abiquo catches a duplicate name exception, it appends a number to the VM name and retries the operation.  

In Abiquo 5.3, the performance of Abiquo will improve when managing VMs in the provider because it is easier to directly find and identify VMs by a single simple ID. And Abiquo can now manage VMs with duplicate names, such as VMs replicated by disaster recovery systems.

In some providers, Abiquo previously used a tag with the VM name as a VM identifier in some public cloud providers. Now these tags are not reserved for the platform, which means another tag is free for use with the new resource tagging feature. Also in previous versions, users could have “lost” a VM from the platform by accidentally changing an identifying name tag. For VMware Cloud Director (VCD), Abiquo now uses the provider ID for all VMs and it does not use the VM metadata.

The use of VM provider IDs to identify VMs makes it easier to rename VMs in the provider and ensures that Abiquo is able to safely detect VM movements or changes directly in the provider, because the VM provider ID remains constant throughout.

When you search or filter VMs, the default search filters will now use the VM’s friendly name (also called the label).

Abiquo will store the provider ID when you configure or capture a VM, and remove it when you undeploy a VM. If you delete a VM from Abiquo without deleting it from the provider, then Abiquo will continue to store the provider ID. This will ensure that Abiquo will automatically recover the right VM if you import the VM with same provider ID again.

With the introduction of provider ID as VM identifier, the abiquo.virtualmachine.namesperdc property is deprecated. The platform used this property for VM capture and DRaaS configurations. 

For an overview of the migration, see Provider ID as VM identifier upgrade.

For full details of the Abiquo upgrade to version 5.3, see Upgrade Abiquo.