Reseller features

Introduction to resellers

The platform supports resellers in private cloud and public cloud.

Abiquo resellers can work with all supported private and public cloud providers.

In private cloud, you can display billing data and estimated bills for your customers.

In public cloud, you can add your Amazon and Azure partner credentials for pricing to Abiquo. Abiquo uses the pricing credentials of the main partner account to obtain the billing data of all the customer accounts.

Abiquo has specific features for Amazon and Azure partners, including:

• Create customer accounts

• Create user login and portal link

• Display cloud provider billing data on Abiquo dashboards

To use these reseller features, add your main account credentials to a reseller enterprise and create customer enterprises. You can automate this process for Azure using the Abiquo setup service, which is part of Abiquo XaaS. With Abiquo XaaS, you can also manage Microsoft accounts and Office 365 licenses.

Reseller hierarchy

A reseller hierarchy is a group of enterprises with two main levels: resellers and customers. You can create a base reseller hierarchy with just these two levels.

You can use a reseller hierarchy to manage public cloud reseller or partner accounts for your customers.

A reseller hierarchy will usually be under the platform owner level.

Customers may have further levels, for example, departments. So an example of a full reseller hierarchy could be:

• Platform owner → resellers → customers → departments.

Diagram:  an example of a reseller hierarchy.

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A reseller hierarchy with customer and department levels

To define a hierarchy, Abiquo uses enterprise scopes.

Cloud reseller white labelling

You can brand the Abiquo user interface for each reseller, and you can also give them their own login theme and URL.

The Abiquo UI is HTML5 and you can easily brand it with the Integrated branding with Themes management feature. There are two main branding elements: the login pages and the tenant themes.

You can brand the login page to replace the logo and background image.

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Abiquo login screen

For each tenant, you can add a logo, main menu icons, a custom color scheme, and more. And for the browser tabs, you can brand the favicon.

For more details about creating themes, see Themes management.

Managed services with VDC roles

To provide managed services, such as read only access to resources in a public cloud provider, you can use virtual datacenter roles. Virtual datacenters contain user resources, in AWS they are VPCs, in Azure, they are Virtual networks. Roles are the set of privileges assigned to a user.

So for example, you can give users full access to resources in private cloud and read-only access to resources in public cloud. By default users have full access to all of their virtual datacenters. A VDC role replaces the user’s role within one or more virtual datacenters.

The administrator can set a default virtual datacenter role for a tenant in a provider, or a region, and they can update specific virtual datacenters with custom roles. For example, AWS virtual datacenters could always be read only, if the administrator sets a VIEWER role to replace a USER role.

The role restriction applies to cloud users only, not administrators, and it is also possible to create exceptions for specific users.

See also:

• Manage virtual datacenters - set a VDC role

• Configure an enterprise in a cloud location - set a default VDC role.

Outsource cloud services with restricted VApps

This feature enables users to outsource the management of their VMs to you as the cloud provider. It also enables you to supply datacenter services within a tenant's virtual datacenter.

Abiquo supports provider services at the VM configuration level with restricted virtual appliances (VApps). Abiquo VApps contain groups of VMs, which can be related. You can perform actions on all the VMs in a VApp, for example, you can deploy them together. 

A cloud user could simply mark a checkbox to outsource a VM (moving it to a restricted VApp). In contrast, an administrator can select or create a restricted VApp.

A restricted VApp is invisible to the cloud user but it is still part of the VDC with access to VDC resources, the administrator can manage it as usual, and it is accounted in the platform as part of the tenant's resources.

See Move VMs - see the section about restricted virtual appliances.

Create reseller pricing models

Abiquo supports reseller pricing with pricing scope and default base prices per datacenter. This feature is especially useful for private cloud pricing estimates and you can use it with private cloud usage data to display billing dashboards. You can assign a pricing model to a reseller and then clone and modify it for customers. You can easily add markup or discounts, and change customer prices.

For more details, see Pricing view and Pricing for resellers

Dashboard billing widgets for resellers

The dashboard widgets display billing data from cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure, Google, and OCI, as well as private cloud with on-premise billing or the Abiquo billing integration and private-billing modules.

The estimated bill is calculated from the cloud usage.

The administrator can configure the dashboard to display data for reseller and partner accounts and their customers, as well as for customers who wish to use accounts that were obtained directly from the provider. The platform controls the display of the hybrid billing dashboard with privileges.

You can also select the services to display and break down the latest bills by service.

For details of how to configure this feature, see Display cloud provider billing data.

Create a customer enterprise with XaaS and Abiquo Setup Service

With XaaS and the AbiquoSetupService, you can automatically create a customer enterprise structure in Abiquo.

• A child scope with name SCOPE- + New enterprise name.

• A key node enterprise in the new scope with name = New enterprise name.

• A new user with role = Default user role and name = admin + New enterprise name

For more details, see Abiquo Setup service

Create a private cloud reseller

Create a reseller administrator role and user

Your reseller administrator will usually manage virtual resources, and they can also manage your customer tenants and users as required.

See Create a reseller administrator user

Create a reseller pricing model

Abiquo has a reseller pricing system that enables you to display pricing estimates for customers that include price factors for markups and discounts, and to display cost estimates on the private cloud billing dashboards.

See Pricing view and Create a reseller pricing model.

Create a reseller scope

Create a reseller enterprise

Create a scope for a reseller customer

To create a scope for a customer of a reseller:

1. Go to Users → Scopes

2. Click + add

3. Enter the details

   1. For the Parent scope, select the reseller scope

       

4. Go to Entities

5. Select the cloud providers and datacenters that the reseller customer will use

6. Click Save

The platform will create the scopes in a hierarchy.

Later, when you create or edit a customer tenant enterprise, for the Default scope you must select the customer tenant scope. The platform will automatically add an enterprise to its Default scope.

You can also select the customer tenant scope for the administrator of this enterprise. This means that the administrators in these enterprises can manage their tenant's users, templates, and so on.

Create a reseller customer

You can create a customer with one or more enterprises. The main customer enterprise is the key node of each customer organization, for example, it would represent the headquarters of an organization.

For each enterprise default scope, there can be only one key node enterprise.

In scopes below the key node enterprise, you can create enterprises to represent public cloud provider sub-accounts or other separate parts of the customer organization, for example, departments of a business, stores in a retail chain.

If the administrators of these tenants will manage their own users, then create a separate scope to include these tenants as part of the scope hierarchy, and assign it to their administrators.

The following steps highlight the differences from creating a reseller enterprise.

1. On the General tab

   1. For the Default scope, select the customer keynode scope

   2. Select the Key node checkbox

       

2. On the Properties tab, enter tenant properties to identify the customer.
   For details of properties for billing dashboards, see Display cloud provider billing data

3. On the Pricing tab, select the customer pricing model

    

4. Click Save