Abiquo and Proxmox

Abiquo can manage Proxmox virtual Environment in your multi-cloud platform

• Follow Proxmox documentation for an standard installation

Supported versions

Abiquo has been tested with the following latest versions.

Proxmox Features

This section describes the Proxmox Virtual environment features supported by Abiquo. You can manage Proxmox technology in Abiquo.

Storage features

Node Discovery

This section describes the required parameters to add Proxmox nodes to Abiquo.

Please refer to Create a physical machine in order to know how to create a Physical Machine.
Below, the steps and attributes for each step will be represented.

Add Proxmox as a Physical Machine

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Physical Machine Attributes for Proxmox VE

• Hypervisor type: Proxmox VE

• Manager IP: Address where proxmox is deployed.

• Agent user: User from Proxmox

• Manager user: User name from API Tokens section on Proxmox.

• Agent password: Password from Agent user

• Manager password: API token from Manager user. Its structured as TokenName=Token

• Agent port: Port to access with Agent Users *Not Required

• Manager port: Port to access with Manager Users *Not Required
  
  

Select Hosts

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Proxmox nodes selected pending to be edited

It is possible to add any of the nodes, or multiple nodes. Please refer to Create a physical machine | Register a physical machine in Abiquo in order to enable the hosts and create the Physical Machine.

Host configuration

This section describes configuration of Proxmox hosts.

Proxmox nodes as hosts

You can add each node of a Proxmox cluster as a host within abiquo, so Abiquo will add this hosts and admin is going to be able to see this nodes agregated by cluster.

This allow then to add multiple clusters within the same abiquo datacenter, within the same Rack or in different datacenters and racks, allowing to benefit from Abiquo flexibility allowing to offer different levels of service for each cluster.

The main advantages of Proxmox clusters and discover all hosts within abiquo are:

• You can make more efficient use of your infrastructure, because when users deploy VMs, Abiquo will allocate in the best node the cluster

• More control and granularity within abiquo.

• Capacity to offer multiple SLA for your customers

All of the VMs in the cluster will be directly listed under the cluster and not on individual hosts.

Host datastores

Abiquo will deploy VMs to datastores that you register in the platform.

For vCenter clusters, you should use shared datastores, so when VMs move, they will always be accessible to all hosts.

For vCenter hosts, when you use a shared datastore, Abiquo creates a different datastore on each physical machine that is using the datastore. This means that a shared datastore can be enabled on one host and disabled on another, either as a result of user configuration or an issue (e.g. an NFS communication error on one host).

Datastore discovery

Abiquo should discover and list all of the datastores that you will use for deploying VMs. When you add your Proxmox node, you will select datastores from this list to use in Abiquo.

Abiquo expects to be able to identify each datastore with a UUID, so it will initially try to create a UUID folder on each datastore.

By default, Abiquo retrieves a datastore if it is accessible and not in maintenance mode on all the hosts in the cluster that mount it.

So by default, if there is a host that has all the datastores mounted, but Abiquo cannot access them (e.g. because the host is down), Abiquo will not return any datastores. You can configure Abiquo to return a datastore mounted on at least one host.

You can also configure Abiquo to ignore datastores by name.

Abiquo will automatically ignore datastores that are not accessible.

See Configure datastore discovery for VMware

Datastore checks

As part of the infrastructure check, Abiquo will check datastores to ensure that it can deploy VMs.

Abiquo checks for the following conditions:

• datastore is accessible

• datastore is mounted as read/write

• datastore is not in maintenance mode

If you activated a datastore, but it fails the datastore check, then Abiquo will automatically deactivate it. If it passes a check in the future, then Abiquo will automatically activate it again. If a deactivated datastore fails the datastore check, then Abiquo will ignore it!

Configuration of VM disks

Abiquo supports thin provisioning, and IDE, SCSI, and SATA disk controllers, and you can configure defaults for the platform.

See Configure VM disks for VMware and for more options, such as ISO disks, see Configure SATA for VMware hypervisors.

VM templates

You can upload OVA and disk files to the Catalogue so users can create VMs from VM templates by self-service.

See Template compatibility table , Add VM templates to the catalogue  and Importing templates into the catalogue

VM snapshots

Abiquo enables users to manage VM snapshots in the user interface. For a full feature description and configuration details, see Abiquo VM snapshoting.

Capture VMs

To prepare and onboard existing VMs into the platform, see About import and capture virtual machines and Import and capture virtual machines.

Remote access to VMs

The platform supports remote access to Proxmox VMs with guacamole.

See Troubleshouting access with Guacamole

Limitations

• Datastore UUID is null, not used

• To build providerIds we need to use the cluster name but note that cluster name must be unique but is setted at installation time only if two proxmox clusters are sharing network. This means that the name of the cluster in a client can be duplicated and is not an editable property.

• In the case that we need to onboard multiple proxmox clusters, we need to ensure that all the names of the nodes are unique, to avoid providerid collisions in Abiquo.

• Unable to get com.abiquo.hypervisor.model.DiskDescription.capacityInBytes (maybe using qemu-img, it requires an agent)

• Skipping physical cdrom “cdrom,media=cdrom”

• Snapshot size is not available

• Is not possible to hot-reconfigure disks controllers

• Not possible to configure QEMU guest actions per vm like: freezefsonbackup or fstrimcloneddisks (Possible problems with Windows templates)

Proxmox plugin properties