Hardware profiles

Introduction to hardware profiles

Hardware profiles are a convenient way of displaying CPU and RAM values that enable you to simplify the configuration of virtual machines for your users. They also enable you to control available hardware configurations and to recommend suitable hardware configurations for virtual machine templates. And you can restrict users to a set of recommended configurations for a template.

• For public clouds with provider hardware profiles, you can synchronize and manage the provider's profiles in Abiquo. 
• For public clouds without hardware profiles and private cloud, you can create and fully manage hardware profiles in Abiquo. 
• Some cloud providers may offer both hardware profiles and CPU and RAM.

For a cloud and tenant with hardware profiles enabled, when a user is creating a virtual machine, the user must select a hardware profile. 

Synchronize hardware profiles with a provider

In public cloud providers with hardware profiles, when you create a public cloud region and add credentials for an enterprise, Abiquo will automatically retrieve the hardware profiles for the public cloud region.

By default, for each enterprise with credentials, the hardware profiles mode is enabled. By default, all hardware profiles are available to all enterprises. The Abiquo administrator can edit the list of profiles that is available to an enterprise in a public cloud region, and they can make recommendations for templates, if this is not done automatically.

For AWS, Abiquo recommends hardware profiles based on information supplied by AWS in the following table, which was loaded into Abiquo at the time this feature was developed: http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/instance-type-matrix/

Create a hardware profile

You can create Abiquo hardware profiles in private cloud datacenters and for public clouds that do not have native hardware profiles.

To create a hardware profile, open the datacenter or public cloud region to the Hardware profiles page, and click the + add button, and enter the details of the hardware profile.

Enable users to work with hardware profiles

After you have synchronized or created hardware profiles, enable users work with them, as follows:

1. Enable hardware profiles for your tenants and select allowed hardware profiles.  Manage Enterprises#Allowtenantstousehardwareprofiles
   
   • This section also describes how to disable hardware profiles for a tenant
2. Configure hardware profiles for templates templates. See Modify a Template for Hypervisor and Modify a Template for Public Cloud
3. Set prices for hardware profiles in pricing view on the Resources tab. See Pricing View#Hardware profiles

Automatic management of hardware profiles

Under some circumstances, the platform will automatically manage hardware profiles.

If you synchronize a public cloud region and a virtual machine has a hardware profile that is not allowed for the enterprise, the platform will automatically allow the hardware profile.

If you capture a virtual machine, 

Users working with hardware profiles

If a user’s enterprise does not have access to any active hardware profiles, the user cannot create virtual machines. If there are no valid active hardware profiles available for a virtual machine template, then users cannot deploy a virtual machine created from this template. If the template is restricted to recommended hardware profiles, then only recommended profiles will display.

if the user has the privilege to Override virtual machine constraints, they can modify virtual machine CPU and RAM to values outside the maximum and minimum values defined in the template, which may alter the hardware profiles displayed for the template.

Edit a virtual machine to change the hardware profile

When you edit a virtual machine, Abiquo will display the hardware profile, as well as the CPU and RAM. If the virtual machine is not deployed, you can change the hardware profile at any time. If the virtual machine is deployed and you are not using hot-add of CPU and RAM, shut down the virtual machine before making changes.

Create a VApp spec with hardware profiles

When you create a VApp spec, Abiquo records the CPU and RAM, but not a specific hardware profile. When you create a virtual appliance from a spec, Abiquo creates a VM and assigns an appropriate hardware profile. In public clouds with native hardware profiles, if there is no hardware profile that matches the CPU and RAM values, Abiquo cannot create a hardware profile, so the user will have to select another one.