Virtual appliances and virtual machines

Virtual datacenters

To work with the cloud platform, you will use virtual datacenters (VDCs) to access your cloud resources and provision new virtual environments.
In a virtual datacenter you can work with virtual resources, including network infrastructure, external storage systems, backups, security, and so on. A virtual datacenter also has the advantages of cloud computing:

• Virtualization

• Pay-as-you-go billing

• Quick scalability

• Technology and hardware abstraction.

A virtual datacenter offers datacenter infrastructure as a service, so you can run your applications more cheaply and with greater flexibility.
In your VDC, you will find compute resources and other resources, such as volumes and public IPs, that you can attach to your VMs. 
Each VDC has similar features and functionality and each VDC belongs to a private cloud datacenter or public cloud region.
In private cloud, a VDC uses a hypervisor of one type only and in public cloud, a VDC can be created by the provider, e.g. in AWS a VDC corresponds to a VPC, or by the platform. 

Screenshot: In the Virtual datacenters view, with the V. Datacenters list and the Virtual appliances tab that contains virtual appliance cards, open a virtual appliance

Open

Open a virtual appliance to view the VMs inside it

Virtual appliances

Within your virtual datacenter, virtual appliances (VApps) are folders that contain groups of VMs.
When you open a VDC, you will probably see one or more virtual appliances.
And you can create more virtual appliances of your own to organize groups of related VMs.

Within your virtual appliance folders, you can easily create VMs by selecting VM templates.
And if your environment supports virtual appliance specifications (VApp specs), to create a virtual appliance from a saved configuration,  you can just select one of these blueprints.

Open

Create a new virtual appliance to hold VMs

Deploy to launch your VMs

When you deploy a virtual appliance, the platform launches and starts up all the VMs. You can also deploy individual VMs.
When you deploy a VM, the platform copies the system disk images to the hypervisor and uses the VM template definition and user configuration to create the VM.

To start the virtual appliance, click the Deploy virtual appliance button in the top right-hand corner of the Virtual machines panel.

This will deploy and start the VMs in the virtual appliance. 

When the virtual appliance is deployed, the Deploy button becomes an Undeploy button or a Deploy all VMs button.
To destroy all the VMs and all your data on the hard disks, click the Undeploy button.

Monitor a VM

Your environment may have VM monitoring configured by default, in which case you can open the virtual appliance's Monitoring tab to view metrics.
And you can select the metrics to display and create alarms for VM metrics when you edit the VM.

Copy VM disks to create an instance template 

An Abiquo instance template is a copy of the selected disks of a VM at a given time that is stored as a VM template. In private cloud with hypervisors, the platform saves the disks and a copy of the original template definition, unless the VM was captured from outside Abiquo. For captured VMs, Abiquo saves the configuration of the VM. In private cloud, the platform stores the instance with the original (main) template in the Catalogue.

Change the configuration of a deployed VM

You can configure VMs before you deploy them, and with reconfigure operations, you can also configure them after they are deployed. For example, you can add memory and CPU, and additional network interfaces or storage.

• Connecting to your VMs: If you don’t configure a network interface card (NIC) before you deploy your VM, the platform will configure a default one.

• Add hard disks to save your data:  Hard disks on the hypervisor datastore are not persistent and when the user undeploys the virtual appliance, the hard disks are destroyed.

Connect to your VMs

You can connect to VMs on most hypervisors and providers using WebMKs, SSH, or RDP by clicking the console button on the VM control panel. To connect in public cloud, before you deploy your VM, you will need to store your SSH public key in your user account.
And in some platforms you will need to enter your telephone number in your user account for connecting to the VM using SSH or RDP.
See Configure your user account

Make changes to a running virtual appliance

Sometimes you will have a VM that is deployed, while another is not deployed. For example, when you add new VMs or deploy only one VM out of a group. This means that the virtual appliance is deployed but not synchronized with the hypervisor or provider.

So the Deploy virtual appliance button changes to become Deploy all VMs button. To deploy any VMs that are not allocated, click this button. If you need to remove VMs while the virtual appliance is in this state, you can undeploy or delete individual VMs. See Delete a server

To destroy a VM in the hypervisor, undeploy it. The platform will keep the configuration of the undeployed VM until you delete it.  If you deploy the VM again, the platform copies the template again from the catalogue. And any changes you made to the disks will be lost.