Capture VMs with duplicate names in different datacenters

Abiquo 5.1.2 enables the administrator to capture a VM in private cloud when another VM with the same name already exists in a different datacenter.  This is a foundation for the new Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) feature that Abiquo will introduce in coming versions.

This feature ensures that the user can fully manage VMs with the same name in different datacenters. It supports VMs on ESXi and includes the use of NSX. It also means that you can use multiple Abiquo datacenters with one Veeam server and backup VMs with duplicate names. However, after you undeploy a VM, you cannot access its backups using Abiquo.

To ensure that your users can work with these VMs and create backups of their VMs and display VM metrics as usual, you must run upgrade scripts to change Veeam job names and update the Redis host and the Watchtower database.

For vCenter hosts and vCenter clusters, you can capture VMs with duplicate names if they are in different datacenters (and effectively, different vCenter clusters). To enable this functionality:

• On the Abiquo Server and the Remote Services, edit the abiquo.properties file and set the abiquo.virtualmachine.namesperdc property to "true" 

  •  You MUST set the same value on all servers

• When you add vCenters to Abiquo:

  • For vCenter hosts, all hosts must belong to a cluster

  • Add all the hosts in the same cluster to the same Abiquo datacenter

  • Use hostnames or IP addresses to register vCenter hosts, but do not mix hostnames and IP addresses

 In Abiquo 5.3, the abiquo.virtualmachine.namesperdc property is deprecated and there are no longer any restrictions on VM names in Abiquo.