Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration

Public cloud regions

To use OCI in Abiquo, the first step is to create a public cloud region.

Creating an Abiquo public cloud region for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the same process as for other providers in the multi-cloud platform.   

Open

Create a public cloud region in OCI

For more details, see Create a public cloud region

Credentials

In OCI, you must subscribe your user to the OCI regions that you wish to use. 

You may restrict cloud user credentials, for example, to use a single resource group (OCI Compartment).

If you wish to create OCI users, then you should add your OCI user to the Administrators group.

See Obtain OCI credentials for more details.

Open

Add credentials for OCI

Hardware profiles

When you create a region and add credentials to an enterprise, the platform will onboard the hardware profiles, which are OCI Shapes.

You can also onboard and use dynamic hardware profiles (which are Oracle "Flex" Shapes).

Resource groups

Abiquo will onboard the resource groups (OCI Compartments) when you onboard a virtual datacenter (which is an OCI Virtual Cloud Network). 

• For more details of how to onboard virtual datacenters from public cloud, see Onboard from public cloud

From the Resource groups tab, you can also manage all of the resources in each resource group.

Create a resource group

If you do not onboard resource groups (compartments) from OCI, you must create a resource group before you perform any other actions in the provider. This is because all resources in OCI must belong to a resource group.

When you create a resource group, OCI may take some time to create it, so please be patient. 

To delete a resource group, it must be empty in Abiquo and in the provider. 

In Abiquo you can edit a resource group in OCI and change its name.

VM template catalogue

After you create a public cloud region and add credentials, you can go the Catalogue and onboard VM templates for your users.

• For more details, see Import public cloud templates

You can search for private software templates by their ID only, to ensure that you will find these templates more quickly. 
OCI private templates belong to resource groups (OCI Compartments).
This means that to search for private templates, Abiquo would need to search in all resource groups in a region, which would affect the search performance.

As for other providers, you can edit OCI software templates to configure them.

The size of OCI template disks is at least 50 GB for Linux and at least 256 GB for Windows.

To reconfigure OCI disks and networks, the VM must be powered on, so on the Advanced tab, the hot-reconfigure options are selected.

When you connect to the VM by remote access, you will need the name of the User from the software template.

Virtual datacenters

In OCI, Abiquo virtual datacenters are Virtual Cloud Networks.

When you create a virtual datacenter, by default, Abiquo will create a private network, which is a private subnet. When you create a virtual datacenter with a Custom private network you can select the option to create an Internet gateway (and a public subnet) or a or NAT gateway (and a private subnet). It is also possible to create a VDC with no networks (the None option). After you create a virtual datacenter, you can create private networks, and you can also select the gateway options. So you can create a very similar configuration to the OCI wizard, which creates a VCN with internet connectivity.

When you create a virtual datacenter, Abiquo also creates an OCI Default security list, and allows outbound access only. This is in addition to the firewall policies that Abiquo users can create.

When you create a virtual datacenter, you select the resource group, which is an OCI Compartment. When you create more entities in the VDC, such as firewalls and private networks, Abiquo will automatically assign them to the same resource group.

As always, you can onboard virtual datacenters with the option from Create virtual datacenter to Synchronize public cloud in myCloud Virtual datacenters view. When the platform onboards a virtual datacenter, it will also onboard all the resource groups.

IP addresses

Abiquo displays an inventory view of the OCI virtual network resources.

Users can create public IPs in Oracle cloud as in other providers. To create a public IP address, select the resource group where you will use the public IP.

Users can also create private networks (subnets) including public subnets with internet gateways at the regional level or in a specific availability zone. OCI Regional subnets are for high availability and have multiple Availability Domains.

To be able to connect with remote access to a VM in OCI, you will need a private IP in a public subnet and a public IP. 

OCI supports private IP and public IP pairs, and you can create or onboard more than one pair, and add more than one private IP to a VNIC sequence.

In OCI, to edit the network configuration, the VM must be running (powered on).

Firewalls

Abiquo users can onboard and manage firewall policies with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Abiquo firewall policies are OCI Security Groups.

Load balancers

OCI supports load balancers with target groups. See Abiquo and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure load balancers.

Volumes

Users can also create volumes of external storage in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Abiquo volumes are generally Block volumes in OCI

When users create a volume, they must select the Availability zone for the volume, which must be the same one as for the VM where they will use the volume.
The supported controller types are PARAVIRTUALIZED and SCSI, and the default controller for a boot volume is PARAVIRTUALIZED.
See https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Block/Concepts/overview.htm#attachtype. Users can create encrypted volumes. 

Users can then edit their VMs and go to the Storage tab to drag volumes into the VM configuration.

When you undeploy a VM, the platform will delete the boot volume because it defines the boot volume as a hard disk.

But the platform will keep the other disks as volumes in the virtual datacenter. Users can add these volumes to other VMs and move the volumes to other virtual datacenters in the same public cloud region.

When you onboard resources, if a VM has persistent volumes attached, the platform will add them to the VDC and VM. Otherwise, it will add them to the cloud location.

When you undeploy an OCI VM in Abiquo, the platform will destroy the boot disk. When terminating an instance directly in OCI, the user can choose if they want to delete the boot volume. If you don't delete the boot volume, then Abiquo can onboard it as a separate OCI volume.

Virtual machines

When users create a VM, they need to select a template and then an Availability zone.

And then they must select a hardware profile as in other public cloud providers. 

If the hardware profile is dynamic (an OCI Flex Shape), then the user can change the CPU and RAM.

Users can drag IPs into their VM configuration, and they can add new IP addresses, including automatically generated ones.

To be able to deploy your VM, the first IP address must always be a private IP address, in a private network or a public subnet.

To be able to connect to your VM, the first IP address must be a private IP in a public subnet and the second IP address must be a public IP. 

Users can select from IPs in regional subnets with multiple availability zones (OCI Availability Domains) and subnets in a single availability zone. 

To be able to connect to the VM, the user should select a firewall to allow connections.

When users configure VMs, to add volumes, they can drag the volumes into the Storage pane.

Abiquo uses the OCI API, which has the following disk size requirements:

• For Linux, to deploy a VM it must have at least 50 GB of disk

• For Windows, to deploy a VM it must have at least 256 GB of disk

See https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Block/Concepts/bootvolumes.htm#Custom

In the OCI portal, you can deploy VMs with smaller disk sizes.

If you onboard these VMs and undeploy them, then when you try to redeploy the VM in Abiquo, if you do not resize the disk, OCI will respond with a disk size validation error.

Abiquo supports VM variables and bootstrap scripts in OCI. 
The Windows templates provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure include cloudbase-init.

Monitoring

When users edit a VM, on the Monitoring tab, they can select the OCI metrics to display. 
For a full list of OCI metrics, see https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Compute/References/computemetrics.htm#Availabl

Then after the VM displays, you can display metrics as usual. For more details, see Manage virtual machines | Display VM metrics .  

Save VM disks as templates

In OCI, you can save the VM boot disk as an Abiquo instance (VM template). See Manage virtual machines advanced | Save VM disks to create an instance template.

To make a template, select the VM and confirm the boot disk

The platform saves the VM template in OCI and adds it to the Abiquo Catalogue.

Remote access

After you deploy a Linux VM, you can access it via SSH with the username from the VM template and the SSH private key. The platform creates the VM with the SSH public key from the user's account.

For Windows VMs, remote access is via RDP with the template username and the initial password, which is available when you open the console from the Abiquo UI.

Multicloud tags

Abiquo supports multicloud tags, which include provider tags and local tags. Abiquo multicloud provider tags in OCI are Freeform tags. You can apply these tags to the following entities in the provider: virtual datacenters, VMs, firewalls, and load balancers. You can apply local tags to all other entities. You can use Abiquo multicloud tags with Abiquo tag policies.

You can onboard OCI Defined tags into Abiquo but you cannot update or delete these tags using Abiquo.

Billing dashboard

In addition to all of the usage statistics, Abiquo can display the Oracle billing data in the Home view on the Hybrid dashboard.
To configure OCI billing data, just need to ensure that your OCI user can access the data and add the tenant's credentials to Abiquo.
You can also add the enterprise property for markup. For more details, see Display OCI billing data .

Screenshot: OCI Last bills widget on the dashboard