Abiquo 3.10 features

This page describes the new features in Abiquo 3.10. 

Virtual machine action plans

As a key feature for VM automation, Abiquo 3.10 introduced action plans that are a series of tasks to run on a VM or a scaling group, or on the platform. Users can create more than one action plan for a VM or scaling group. See Manage action plans and Control view.

VM template scopes

Abiquo 3.10 introduced more control over shared templates using template scopes in both private and public cloud. As in previous versions, Abiquo marks shared templates with the shared symbol. However, the checkbox to share a template directly was removed in Abiquo 3.10.

Pricing per datacenter and reseller support

Abiquo 3.10 introduces new and improved functionality in the pricing feature. Differentiate your cloud offer by location with different resource prices per private cloud datacenter and public cloud region. Public cloud pricing by hardware profile will be introduced in future versions. Separate pricing for CPUs and RAM when virtual machines are ON or OFF. Added pricing for local datastore tiered storage. Display the current virtual appliance price at any time, simply by clicking the virtual appliance estimate button.Add a list of prices per virtual machine to the estimate message with the new VM_PRICES variable.

For Reseller pricing, a pricing model now has an automatic scope (the same as the creating user's), so pricing users can manage only their own models for their own tenants. Users with pricing privileges can always view the pricing model assigned to their own enterprise. The reseller's resource prices are the base prices and the reseller can mark them up (or down) in each new pricing model for their customers.

When you upgrade from 3.8.x to 3.10, Abiquo will assign the prices of an existing pricing model to each individual datacenter now in the pricing model. See Pricing view

Onboard public cloud regions

Abiquo 3.10 enables you to onboard a group of virtual resources from a cloud provider. This might be a public cloud group, such as an AWS VPC or an Azure Virtual Network, or it may be all of the resources in a public cloud region. Your resources will be onboarded and grouped in a virtual datacenter as in the public cloud group, or in a logical virtual datacenter for the whole public cloud region. See Manage Virtual Datacenters.

Azure ARM integration

Abiquo 3.10 introduced the Microsoft Azure ARM integration with support for Azure Virtual Networks. 

Override IDs of ESXi metrics

For ESXi, by default Abiquo defines a set of metrics (PerfMetrics) to retrieve and it includes the expected ID (PerfMetricId). However, the IDs of the metrics are dynamic and may change in some environments (for example, certain vCenter configurations), so Abiquo 3.10 introduced properties to override these metrics IDs in remote services for any specific datacenter.

Set VM hostname with VMware guest customizations

Abiquo 3.10 introduced VM configuration automation with features such as set a hostname. More recent versions of Abiquo can set a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) before the VM is deployed, with one of the following options (in order of priority):

1. The FQDN that the user manually enters for the VM

2. A hostname based on the Abiquo database ID, plus VM network domain name (from VM NIC or VDC default VLAN), or localdomain (automatic)

3. A hostname that is the VM_uuid (or Abiquo database ID on Windows), plus VM network domain name, or localdomain (automatic)

Relocate a virtual machine to a compatible hypervisor

With the relocate VM feature introduced in Abiquo 3.10, you can move a deployed VM to another hypervisor on the same rack with the same manager. This feature is available for VMware ESXi and uses the vMotion feature. This feature requires the "Relocate a VM into a compatible host" privilege. Note: this feature is not supported for VMware clusters as hosts because Abiquo does not manage the individual ESXi hosts.