This document is part of the Abiquo walkthrough and it describes the Catalogue.
The previous page in the walkthrough is Virtual datacenters and the next page is Tenants and users.
The Catalogue is where the Admin will make it easy for the cloud users to work with the infrastructure that they are providing. In the catalogue, the Admin will provide the VM templates for creating VMs and blueprints for creating virtual appliance (VApp) configurations, and the Admin can configure services for XaaS.
In each private cloud datacenter, the Admin should configure the catalogue based on an NFS Repository. Then Admins can upload templates as OVAs, template disks, or ISO disks, for example. The catalogue in public cloud for templates is a cache of template details with links to the original provider templates.
For Service Providers the catalogue enables the provider to offer appliances and applications to their customer. For Enterprises the catalogue provides a central, controlled image repository so that only approved images can be deployed onto the infrastructure.
The Cloud Admin can upload VM templates from the local filesystem and may also allow Enterprise Admins to upload their own templates to the Catalogue for their users. If the enterprise is a reseller, the Cloud Admin can allow them to share templates with their tenants.
Users can create clones of their VM disks as instance templates. In private cloud, instances are stored with the main templates in the Catalogue.
In private cloud datacenters, Cloud Admins can set allocation limits to ensure that no single enterprise uses all the repository space. The platform meters Repository usage and you can bill each tenant for it.
For customers running multiple Abiquo datacenters, Abiquo has a template mobility feature that can export from a private cloud datacenter to another datacenter and supported public cloud providers.
In public cloud regions, the Catalogue enables you to filter and search for public cloud images. It also allows you to import the image details into the Abiquo public cloud region Catalogue, which is a cache of template definitions. Here you can modify the way that Abiquo will present the public cloud templates to your users and, for example, restrict the hardware profiles that users can work with. Users can easily find and deploy the approved templates cached in the Catalogue. Users can also create instance templates to clone the disks of their VMs running in the public cloud region.
In both private and public cloud, Admins can also create application blueprints called virtual appliance specs by saving the configuration of a group of VMs to the catalogue. The user can then select to the blueprint to automatically create a new virtual appliance directly from the blueprint.
And Admins can create default service configurations for Abiquo XaaS, which supports many services out of the box including AWX, AWS RDS, AWS Route 53, and Azure MySQL database.
Abiquo XaaS will let you easily integrate any kind of service into Abiquo and then offer it directly to your customers.
