Detect vCenter management IPs

Abiquo can manage VMware hosts at different levels, as ESXi hosts, vCenter server hosts, and vCenter clusters. 

When adding vCenter server hosts to the platform, the administrator selects from a list of host IPs. Abiquo 4.6.1 can filter the list of IPs to ensure the administrator selects an appropriate IP. You can also edit a host in the UI to change the management IP. Remote access to a vCenter host is through the hypervisor's service IP.

When adding vCenter clusters to the platform, the administrator selects the cluster ID. The hypervisor's service IP is not used for remote access.  The VM's IP address for remote access is one of the network interfaces of the current host of the VM. For Abiquo 4.6.1 you can define filters to select the required host IPs for remote access, for example, to only use the network interfaces for management traffic. The platform will automatically add the management IPs to use for remote access to deployed VMs during the periodic check. 

The following diagram shows the IPs that Abiquo will use to discover and manage hosts and allow remote access in these configurations.

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Configuration

To enable and configure the IP filter, you can use the following Abiquo configuration properties. The "networks" property is a list of networks in CIDR format that defines the network priority order for selecting management IPs. If there are multiple IPs in the same network, you can use also use /32 CIDR notation or a single IP address. This feature currently uses IPv4 configuration. The "onlymanagementip" property only applies if the networks property is not defined. It enables a specific search for NICs defined in vCenter as IPs for management traffic. 

In the following example, given two candidate IPs, where one is in 10.60.1.0/24 and the other in 10.70.1.0/24, then the IP from 10.60.1.0/24 will be selected because it is in the first network.

If the platform does not find any IPs with the filters, then it will fall back to using the first available IP, as in previous versions.

How to upgrade

You must enable this feature manually because it is not part of the automated upgrade process so we recommend that you enable this feature in new installations.

If you are using VCENTER_CLUSTER, for the VMs running in the cluster, the platform will update the remote access IP directly after the upgrade.

If you are adding an additional host as VMX_04 (host in vCenter), and you already added some hosts, then when you add a new host, the platform will assign the new IP. You MUST then edit the existing hosts to use the new IP. The existing host is not recognized as one you already added, and it displays as a new host using the new IP. DO NOT ADD the host again with the new IP because this will cause unexpected behavior. Edit the existing host to configure the new IP.