Abiquo 4.2 features

Abiquo launched version 4.2 of its award-winning software in December 2017. With the abilities to deliver VM horizontal and vertical auto-scaling on any cloud, schedule workload actions, create application blueprints and deploy them to multiple cloud infrastructures, set up application and workload monitoring and offer different storage SLAs to different tenant groups, Abiquo customers can meet their tenants' needs and differentiate their services even further. Enhanced support for reseller models helps MSPs find new routes to market. Advanced multi-tenancy capabilities, optimization tools and the new metrics tabs are some of the new features included in this last release. This document describes how Abiquo v4.2 can benefit your business, and please contact us for more information.

The following features and improvements were introduced in Abiquo 4.2:

New dashboard widgets

See Home View with Metrics, Hybrid, and Optimization tabs. In v4.2.3+, the Administrator can configure billing widgets obtain provider billing information. And they can enable users to display these sections on the Hybrid tab with the appropriate privileges. To view more details of the latest bills, click on the link to Show more bills and select a point on the billing graph.The new Hybrid tab provides an overview of your resources in public cloud providers and your private clouds. This tab has two panels with the count of VMs and the VMs by location, which show a pie chart and list of the mix of VMs in public and private clouds.

Abiquo's Metrics tab provides an overview of the resources an enterprise is using across the platform. The tab contains 6 different panels including information about the resources used by a workload, such as CPU, RAM, disk I/O and network traffic. A new panel displays the Last deployed VMs. And another one displays the Last triggered alerts. From these two panels you can follow auto-scaling triggered by the monitoring system, based on alerts for built-in provider metrics or custom application metrics gathered using collectd.

The new Optimization tab aims to help you make the best use of your cloud resources and save money on your public cloud fees. The display contains 7 panels that give you real-time information about the highest and lowest usage of CPU and RAM, the VMs with the longest time on, and unused public IPs and load balancers. Detailed reporting is also available on the platform.

Guacamole integration for unified remote access across all providers

See Configure Remote Access to VMs and Connect to your VM and Changes to branding and Abiquo Branding Guide.The new Guacamole integration offers a single solution for unified remote access across providers, supporting consoles using VNC, RDP, and SSH. Guacamole connections are managed by a new Remote Access Manager remote service. When editing VM general information, users can now select a keymap to configure in a VM for ESXi. And for all connections, users can also select an on-screen keyboard for use in the Guacamole client. Customers can brand the Guacamole client by copying the stylesheet to their themes.The user can request a random initial password for the guest, they can then check the guest initial password, and as always, the platform controls the user access to these actions with privileges.

Infrastructure view tab showing all VMs at datacenter level

See Administer VMs in infrastructure. Abiquo 4.2 introduces a new Virtual machines tab that displays all workloads at the Infrastructure level, not just per hypervisor. And the new wildcard search will help you easily locate specific VMs. And as always you can click through to the Virtual datacenter or Virtual appliance from the entity name link.

Exclude customer network ranges

See Manage excluded networks. Abiquo extends the functionality for managing networks that supply datacenter services with the excluded network feature. In addition to controlling the use of NICs on these restricted networks, you can now prevent users from creating new networks with the excluded network address ranges. There is a new Excluded tab for managing this feature. To exclude a network, you just need to enter the network details.

VMware capacity control at cluster level

See Allocation Rules#Compute load level rules. Abiquo integrates closely with VMware and manages vCenter as a master hypervisor. Now Abiquo 4.2 increases control over workload placement and host capacity as it enables you to set allocation rules for VMware clusters. A cluster rule always has the highest priority over datacenter, rack, and server rules. A cluster rule affects all hosts in a cluster, irrespective of their state, for example, it applies to hosts that are powered off. The platform will now display clusters in the Servers tree in Infrastructure view. When you are creating a load level compute rule, the new Aggregate checkbox enables you to create a rule for the sum of all resources in a group (datacenters, racks or clusters) and calculate the load level percentage of the total in order to determine the available resources for the group.

Template list view

See Manage VM templates. The Apps library in Abiquo 4.2 has a new VM template list view that offers template details in a grid format. You can now control templates at a glance and use the new wildcard search feature for searching this list too

Apply firewalls per networks

See Manage Networks#Createaprivatenetwork, Manage Public Networks, Manage External Networks, Manage Unmanaged Networks. The firewalls per network feature enables you to select the VM NICs that a firewall policy should apply to. When users create a network, there is a new checkbox to exclude the network from the firewall policies applied to the VM. With this feature you can configure networks to supply datacenter services without any restrictions from the VM firewall policies that users create.

Wildcards in search boxes. 

See Starting Abiquo for the First Time#Search in lists. On screens displaying lists of entities, users can enter a text string in the search box to retrieve all entities with the string in their text fields. From Abiquo 4.2, users can also enter a text containing one or more wildcard asterisk * characters.

Re-enable automatic send mail after an alert is activated. 

See Manage Alerts

Manage VM disk allocation

Abiquo 4.2 gives you more control over disk allocation on ESXi, with a new Allocation attribute in the VM template and VM disks. A user with the appropriate privileges can set template disk allocation. And a user with the appropriate privileges can modify the allocation value after a VM is created and before it is deployed.

Control the use of ISO disks

Abiquo 4.2 contains a new privilege that enables you to control whether users can work with ISO disks or not. Customers should check the roles of users who will work with ISOs to ensure they have the appropriate privileges

Change to API authentication

As a security improvement, in Abiquo 4.2, cookie based authentication was replaced with request header based authentication. See Authentication

Improvements to vCloud Director integration

In Abiquo v4.2.3+ you can manage vCloud Director in Abiquo with Administrator or Organization credentials. If you create a public cloud region with Administrator credentials, multiple organizations can share it. In addition, Abiquo now synchronizes vCloud virtual appliances as Abiquo virtual datacenters. And Abiquo now supports vCloud virtual appliances that contain multiple virtual machines. In Abiquo v4.2.3, the administrator can configure only live metrics, or live metrics fallback when historical data is not present using Abiquo Configuration Properties. Abiquo also supports vCloud virtual appliance networks as Abiquo private networks, with the possibility of configuring access to an external network.

Mail server options

In Abiquo 4.2, the administrator can set values for a full range of SMTP options in the abiquo.properties file, see Abiquo Configuration Properties#server

Role mapping to multiple AD groups

As users may belong to more than one Active Directory group, Abiquo 4.2 enables administrators to map each Abiquo role to multiple groups.

Backup improvements

There is a new Backup policies tab on the VM control panel, where users can quickly access backup information. Other recent improvements include the ability to restore a VM that is not deployed from a backup in Avamar. The list of VM backups will now display the backup expiry date, and the site where the backup is done (destination) and if the backup is a replica. And administrators can now control if users can restore Avamar replica backups or not.

VApp spec improvements

In Abiquo 4.2, when users are creating a virtual appliance from a spec blueprint, they can now edit VM firewall rules and if a hardware profile is not available, they may select a replacement.

Send guest password by SMS

To enable the platform to send guest passwords by SMS, Abiquo can now store a phone number in user information. And the administrator can configure an AD integration to retrieve the phone number from user AD entries. 

Network address translation blueprint for NSX

Abiquo can automatically configure Network Address Translation (NAT) for your users with a new plugin for NSX. The NAT feature enables more effective use of public IPs, because multiple VMs can share a single IP using different ports. As for other NSX network blueprints, the administrator configures the integration and creates a device in Abiquo to define the connection to the NSX system. Then the administrator creates NAT networks that contain a range of public IPs for use with NAT. The administrator manages the NAT IPs in the same way as public IPs.

When the user creates a VDC, the platform automatically assigns an available IP in a NAT network. This will be used to configure a default SNAT rule for all the private networks in the VDC, enabling an outside network or internet connection through the NAT IP, which is marked with a star symbol. The virtual datacenters NAT screen displays the NAT rules created by the users for the virtual datacenter; the platform does not display the default rule. A user with appropriate privileges can change the default NAT IP. Users can work with NAT IPs by adding NAT rules for the VM.

Users can also add NAT IPs as the public IP addresses for load balancers. The platform will create a NAT rule to match the routing rule port mappings of a load balancer with a NAT IP.

Generally, to enable services running on VM ports to be accessed from the outside network via the NAT IP, users will create DNAT rules. However, users can also create additional custom SNAT rules for VMs, to override the default rules and send outgoing traffic through a different NAT IP.

NSX integration - Control Edge allocation

The administrator can now set an allocation policy for Edge placement so that Edges can be automatically deployed on the datastore with the least VMs or the most space. See NSX Gateway configuration guide and NSX with ECMP configuration guide