Abiquo and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Abiquo 5.4 offers support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with a new integration that enables you to use this cloud provider in the multicloud platform.

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.

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OCI Last bills widget on the dashboard

Public cloud regions

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

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Create a public cloud region in OCI with Abiquo

Credentials

You must subscribe your user to the OCI regions that you wish to use in OCI. 

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

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

See Obtain OCI credentials for more details.

Hardware profiles

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

From Abiquo 5.4.1 onwards, you can also onboard and use dynamic hardware profiles (which are OCI "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). From the Resource groups tab, you can also manage all of the resources in each resource group.

If you do not onboard resource groups, you must create a resource group (OCI Compartment) before you perform any other actions in the provider, 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 catalog

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

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), so when searching 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. Abiquo uses a very similar configuration to the OCI wizard to create a VCN with internet connectivity.

Abiquo creates two private networks and one of these networks is a public subnet with an internet gateway. And 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 Abiquo will also automatically assign to other entities that you create within the VDC, such as firewalls and private networks.

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

To create virtual datacenters in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the process is the same as in other providers.

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. 

Secondary IP addresses in OCI

In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure users can assign secondary IP addresses to vNICs but this was not supported in the initial OCI integration. For details of support in later versions, see Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integration

Firewalls

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

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 requirement: you cannot deploy a VM with less than 50 GB of disk (for Linux) or 256 GB of disk (for Windows). 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.

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

Screenshot: Select VM metrics

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

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 5.4.1 introduces support for multicloud tags, which include provider tags and local tags. Abiquo multicloud provider tags in OCI are Freeform tags and 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. In future versions of Abiquo, you will be able to use multicloud tags with Abiquo multicloud tag policies. In later versions, Abiquo can onboard Defined tags.