Install a monolithic environment

Required skills

Some essential system administration skills required for managing the cloud platform are as follows:

• CentOS/RedHat Linux expertise for maintaining the Abiquo servers, which are Linux servers

• Computer and network security expertise is required to configure and maintain the cloud platform

• Advanced hypervisor knowledge including VM templates

• Networking including design, switch configuration, VLAN and DHCP and/or SDN configuration

• Storage including hypervisor datastores, NFS/CIFS and optional iSCSI storage

If you are testing Abiquo, you may not need all of these skills right away, but they are required to run a production environment.

Server components

Abiquo has the following key server components:

1. Abiquo Server (Cloud orchestrator, API, UI)

2. Remote Services (That do the work of managing the cloud, with one set per Abiquo DC)

3. Optional monitoring Server (Manage VM and platform metrics data)

These components can be installed in different installation profiles.

Installation profiles

There are three main ways to install Abiquo:

1. Monolithic server (small environment, also for labs and testing)

2. Distributed environment (larger environment, better for production)

3. HA environment (large, high performance environments)

This document describes how to install a monolithic environment. 

Introduction to the monolithic environment

A monolithic environment means that you have a single server with the Abiquo Server and Remote Services. And an optional Monitoring server.

If you want to test with large templates and you want better performance, install the remote service that manages template conversions on a separate server.

Before you install, you will need to prepare an NFS folder and your networks. Then install the Monolithic Server and the Monitoring Server from the OVA files.

To get an idea of how all of this will look when you're done, see the diagram of the Monolithic environment below.

For more details, see Abiquo components

NFS folder

The platform will store the catalog of VM templates in an NFS folder. Prepare a folder with enough space to add all of your VM template disks and a fast network connection.

Abiquo will automatically mount the NFS folder on remote services (Monolithic server) and hypervisors. Then when you deploy a VM, Abiquo copies the template from the NFS to the hypervisor datastore.

The NFS folder must be writeable by the Abiquo Tomcat processes. You may need to check on your NFS server in the /etc/exports file that the NFS folder has the no_root_squash option, so that you can change the ownership of the NFS share on the Abiquo monolithic server.

Abiquo can also convert templates from one format to another (V2V server). If you are working with large templates and multiple formats, you may wish to install the remote service that manages this on a separate server.

During the Abiquo install process, you will need to enter the network address and folder name.

For more details, see VM repository folder

Networks

You will need to put the Abiquo Monolithic server and components on the same network, which we call the Management network.

The VM networks are a group, which we call the Service network. For these networks you will need the following:

1. A range of network tags for your VMs to use in private networks.
   Configure this in your network infrastructure and then enter the tags for each group of hypervisors when you configure your Abiquo racks.
   Abiquo will assign a tag from the pool when it deploys the first VM in a private network.

2. Network tags of other networks in your infrastructure that users can work with:

   1. Public networks (shared by all enterprises, users can purchase IPs)

   2. External networks (any kind of IP address, one tenant only).

Don’t forget to connect your hypervisors to the Service network… :-)

To assign IP addresses to VMs, Abiquo has a default DHCP configuration, which you can use in an isolated test environment. Abiquo also offers dnsmasq. 

For more details, see:

• Network for specifications

• Networking guide for Abiquo networking concepts

• Networking for descriptions of the networks

Appliance requirements

The Abiquo OVAs require at least the following virtualized hardware for your test environment:

• 2 CPUs

• 8 GB RAM

• 64 GB HD

Monolithic server install parameters

Before you begin the install, make sure you know the values of the following parameters that you will need to enter during the install process. 

Tip: you can note these values on a copy of the Monolithic environment worksheet. For examples, see Monolithic environment worksheet sample.

Install a monolithic server from the OVA

Follow the steps at https://abiquo.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/doc/pages/572784641.

Post-install steps for monolithic server

1. Log in to your monolithic server

2. Check that the NFS repository is mounted at /opt/vm_repository

3. Check that the owner of the NFS repository is tomcat, and if not, set it as follows

   chown -R tomcat /opt/vm_repository chmod -R a+r /opt/vm_repository

Monitoring server install from the OVA

The Abiquo monitoring appliance is optional. To deploy the Monitoring appliance, you will need to enter the following parameter.

Follow the steps at https://abiquo.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/doc/pages/572784641

Prepare your hypervisors

Abiquo supports VMware vCenter with access at the cluster or host level. Abiquo supports any kind of datastore that your hypervisor supports. Your hypervisors will need to mount the NFS folder.
Abiquo gives users remote access to their VMs via WebMKS.

For supported features and configuration details, see VMware.

Monolithic environment diagram

When you've completed the install, your environment should be like the one shown here.

For the connections to add to your firewalls, you will also find a table in the next section.

Open

Monolithic ports and communications

Monolithic environment firewalls

This section lists the ports you will need to open on each server in your test environment.

Abiquo monolithic server

 To allow users to upload and download VM templates, you can allow an optional connection from users to this server (specifically the Appliance Manager Remote Service that handles this functionality).   

Abiquo monitoring server

NFS server

Hypervisors

Browser requirements

Abiquo UI requires a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768 for productive work.
It is based on HTML5 so browsers must support these HTML5 features: Forms block, Drag and drop.

The Abiquo UI is optimized for use with Firefox and Chrome.

Next steps

• For a quick introduction to the platform, do the Abiquo quick tutorial

• After that, to present the platform to others, try the Abiquo quick walkthrough of private cloud

• To read more details about the platform, see Get started

• For more complete user manuals, see Abiquo cloud guides

• To get started with the Abiquo API, see The Abiquo API and, in particular, Get started with the Abiquo API