Infrastructure provisioning guide

Flow chart to provision private cloud infrastructure

Before you begin

• Install and configure the platform Abiquo. See Install a test environment

• Configure DHCP remote service with dnsmasq

• Prepare your hypervisors. See Private cloud providers

• Log in to Abiquo. See Starting Abiquo for the first time

• Configure the platform in Configuration View, including password security

• Configure additional authentication and authorization systems

  • Configure SAML integration

  • Configure LDAP and Active Directory integration

  • Configure Abiquo OpenID Connect integration

  • Configure two factor authentication

• Prepare themes for white-labelling at Themes management

Provision private cloud infrastructure

1. Create a datacenter

Abiquo defines an Abiquo datacenter as a set of IT resources (servers, networking and external storage) in the same physical location. Remote services are applications that perform operations for the Abiquo orchestrator. Each Abiquo datacenter has a set of remote services.

Before you begin

1. Obtain the IP address of the Remote Services server. For a monolithic environment, this is the same as your Abiquo Server IP address

2. Obtain details of your chosen networking solution, such as dnsmasq, NSX-T, or guest setup with cloud-init

To create a datacenter and add its remote services to the platform:

1. On the main menu, click the Infrastructure icon and go to Private

   Open

   

   Infrastructure icon on main menu

2. At the bottom of the Datacenters list, click the + add button

3. On the Create datacenter dialog, enter the Name of the datacenter and its Location to plot the datacenter on the Infrastructure view map. Then click Next 

   Open

   

   Create a datacenter

4. To create the datacenter remote services, enter the IP address of the Remote services servers.
   As a shortcut, to copy the remote service location to all remote services, enter the IP address for the Virtualization manager, and click Duplicate IP addresses

   1. If you have a separate Remote services server, such as for V2V (BPM), enter the IP address

   2. If you are using dnsmasq, enter the protocol of dnsmasq too

5. Click Check all. If all checks pass, click Save

    

2. Create datastore storage service levels

In private cloud, to group hypervisor datastores and price them according to service levels, use datastore tiers. 

1. Optionally, create abstract datastore tiers to control storage service levels in more than one datacenter. This enables you to bill a customer for the same service level in different datacenters.

   1. Go to Infrastructure → Abstract datastore tiers

   2. Click the + add button

   3. Enter the Name

2. Create datastore tiers for storage service levels

   1. Infrastructure → Private

   2. Select your datacenter and go to Datastore tiers

   3. Click the + add button

   4. Enter the Name and Description

   5. Optionally, select an Abstract datastore tier to group all datastore tiers of the same level

3. Create network service types

Create network service types to assign network interfaces on hypervisors to datacenter networks.

1. In your datacenter, go to Network → Network service types 

2. Click the + add button 

3. Enter the Name of the network service type that the tag will represent

4. Reserve private network address ranges

To prevent users from creating private networks that use a certain network address range, you can reserve the range by creating an excluded network.

1. In your datacenter, go to Network → Excluded

2. Click the + add button

3. The Network name can have up to 128 characters

4. Enter the Netmask in CIDR format

   1. For IPv4 networks created in the platform, the netmask can have a value of 16 to 30 inclusive

   2. For IPv6, it can have a value of 64, 56, or 48

5. Create racks

Create Abiquo racks to group hosts by compute service level and network switch, and to control tags for hypervisors on the racks.

Before you begin:

1. Obtain the range of network tags for private networks in the rack-top switch

To create a rack:

1. In your datacenter, go to Servers

2. At the bottom of the Physical servers list, click the + add button and select Rack

3. Enter the Name and a description

    

    

4. Go to Network

   1. For Network ID min and Network ID max, enter the range of the tags (e.g. VLAN or VXLAN tags) for the platform to use on this rack for private networks

   2. For Excluded network IDs, enter a comma-separated list of ranges (with a dash "-") and/or individual tags that you will use for other networks, such as public networks

   3. For Reserved networks per VDC enter the number of networks that you generally expect VDCs to use. This is not a real reservation, but it will prevent the creation of too many VDCs on the rack in total. These networks are NOT reserved for any specific VDC.
      If the maximum networks or allocation limits can exceed this setting, the networks may be all used before this setting is reached. To prevent users from using more than a certain number of networks, set allocation limits for networks.

   4. For Network pool size enter the number of VLANs to reserve for already deployed VDCs that use more than the expected number. These network tags are kept for use in deployed VDCs after the total number of networks created exceeds the total reserved (expected) number.
      Users can deploy new VDCs in a rack if there are enough network tags for a new VDC to deploy without using network tags from this pool.

       

6. Add servers

1. Use Abiquo to discover servers (also called physical machines or hypervisor hosts) to add to your rack. Servers may be a hypervisor controller such as VMware vCenter, and you may then add a vCenter host or vCenter cluster as a physical machine

   1. Select a rack, then click the + add button. Select Physical machine

   2. Select the Hypervisor type

      • Remember that you add a vCenter once only; you cannot add it as a cluster and as a hypervisor!  

   3. Enter the connection details. You can enter the IP address or the FQDN of the server

       

   4. For a hypervisor controller, the platform will display a list of the physical machines it manages.
      Select the ones to add and click Edit to complete their details as required. 

2. To register a physical machine in Abiquo, do these steps.

   1. Enter the Name, which defaults to its IP address, and check the other details

   2. Go to Network interfaces and enable at least one network interface. To do this, select the network service type (NST) of the networks on this interface. If necessary, deselect the incorrect NST first.

   3. Go to Datastores and and enable at least one datastore. 

      1. For vCenter clusters, use shared datastores, and if you require local datastores, add them to single-host tiers

         • When you use a shared datastore, the platform creates a different datastore on each physical machine that uses the datastore. This means that a shared datastore can be enabled on one host and disabled on another, either as a result of user configuration or an issue (e.g. an NFS communication error on one host).

      2. Do not enable the NFS repository (usually /opt/vm_repository) because this will severely degrade deployment performance

   4. Click Accept

7. Create allocation rules for oversubscription

Create allocation rules to oversubscribe test environments with extra

1. In your datacenter, go to Allocation rules

2. On the Global pane, click the +add button

3. For the Rule type, select Load level compute

   1. If you are using a cluster as a physical machine, to create rules for the cluster, select the Server option

4. In a test environment, you can oversubscribe RAM and CPU cores but this is not recommended for production

8. Create hardware profiles

Create hardware profiles families and types to classify hardware profiles

1. In your datacenter, Go to Hardware profiles 

2. At the bottom of the Types list, click the + add button and select Family

3. Enter the Name and Description, and click Save

4. Then within your hardware profile family, click + add to create each hardware profile Type

5. In your datacenter, go to Hardware profiles

   1. Click the + add button

   2. Select the Family and Type and enter the Name

   3. Enter a unique combination of CPU and RAM for the datacenter

   4. Optionally, to enable users to enter a value for CPU and/or RAM, select Dynamic

   5. Optionally, enter Cores per socket. The CPU value must be divisible by Cores per socket

   6. Optionally, add Extra charges with a cost code. See Manage extra charges with cost codes

   7. Select Active so users can work with this hardware profile when it is allowed for their tenant

   8. Select Current generation to indicate that this hardware profile is compatible with current VM templates

       

Next steps

• Provision tenants, see Tenant provisioning guide