This page describes how to configure VMs in detail. Before you read this page, you may like to work through Manage Virtual Machines to help you get started working with VMs. After you add your VMs to a virtual appliance, you can configure the VMs before deployment or reconfigure after deployment. Each of these configuration topics is also available as a separate page.
Prepare to configure a VM
To prepare to configure a VM do these steps:
Privileges: Edit virtual appliance details
If your VM is deployed
If your VM supports hot-reconfigure (in private cloud on VMware hypervisors, in public cloud, see provider features tables), you may configure when powered on
If your VM does not support hot-reconfigure, select the VM and go to the stop button.
If your guest supports graceful shutdown with guest tools, select the Shut down option
Or connect to the VM and shut it down directly
Or if your VM is prepared for a hard shutdown, select Power off
On Azure, you may need to Deallocate the VM
On the VM icon, select the options menu, and select Edit. Full configuration details are given below
After you make your changes click Save. The platform will reconfigure the VM.
Deploy or power on the VM as appropriate.
Infrastructure updates
The periodic infrastructure check will detect direct changes to the VMs (CPU, RAM and hard disk) and register these changes in platform statistics and accounting, as well as on the VM general configuration page.
General configuration
Configure Network
Configure Storage
Configure VM Backups
Create a VM backup
Backup results
To display backup results:
Go to myCloud Virtual datacenters
Edit VM
Go to Backup → Backup results
The results shown may vary depending on your datacenter's backup system. Backups with a status of done or completed will have a Restore link enabled in the Action column.
Restore a backup
The administrator may allow users to restore their own backups.
Privileges: Restore virtual machine backups
To restore a VM backup:
Go to myCloud Virtual datacenters
Edit a VM
Go to Backups → Backup results
In the Latest backups section, in the Action column on the right, click the Restore link
To display the details of the restore, in the Latest backups list, click on the backup.
After the platform finishes the restore, it will display a status, such as done or failed.
After you restore a backup, the VM disks are under the control of the backup system, not the platform. So when you undeploy after restoring a VM, the platform will display a warning popup and delete and remove the VM's disks.
If your environment permits, you may request more than one restore of the same backup. If the status of the restore request is success or failed, Abiquo will reactivate the Restore link and you can click it to request a new restore of the same backup.
Backup events
For users the backup feature will produce the events described on the Events table page in the Virtual machine section, under METADATA_MODIFIED and RESTORE_BACKUP.
To display VM backup events:
Go to myCloud Virtual datacenters
Edit the VM
Go to Backup → Events
This page will display events from backup integrations.
To view the details of an event, click on the event.
Create a manual backup now
If your backup system supports immediate backups, you can request them at any time.
To request a manual backup of a VM now:
Go to myCloud Virtual datacenters
Edit the VM and go to Backup
At the bottom of the Backup tab, click the Backup now button
The platform will request an immediate backup of the VM or a VM snapshot
Configure Bootstrap Scripts
Assign Firewalls
Configure Chef
Assign Load Balancers
Configure Metrics
To display and filter metrics for a VM:
Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances
Open the virtual appliance
On the VM icon → click the graph metrics symbol
The metrics panel will open and you can dynamically filter and select which metrics to display.
To update the display of a metric, click the round-arrow refresh button.
To configure the display of the metric:
Select the funnel filter button
Set the following as required
Granularity, which is how often the metric is sampled
Statistic, which determines how the raw values will be processed over time
Last period, which is how long the display will look behind at the processed data
Metric dimensions for metrics with more than one element, such as multiple hard disks, you can display metric dimensions, which are metrics for separate elements.
To view metric dimensions, click Get dimensions. Select a dimension.
If no dimension is selected, the default value is the average of all dimensions
Click Accept to save the values.
To view the exact metric values in a call-out box, mouse over the metric graph line.
To create a highlight point, click on the metric graph line.
To simultaneously view the data for more than one VM, in the virtual appliance go to the Monitoring section.
Configure Variables
Before you deploy a VM, you can set guest variables to pass user data to your VM. This functionality uses cloud-init and requires appropriate templates. In private cloud, the templates must have the guest setup flag set to cloud init. The administrator can add default variables for the VM template.
This functionality is available through the API. The platform stores variables in the VirtualMachine variables attribute, which is a dictionary of keys and values. See “Update a virtual machine” in VirtualMachinesResource
You can modify VM variables before you deploy the VM
Check your cloud providers' documentation for their recommendations about confidential information in variables
To add VM variables:
Go to Virtual datacenters and edit a VM that is not deployed
Go to Variables
Enter a Key and Value
The length of these can be up to 255 characters each
Click Add
Add more variables as required
To delete a variable click the trash can symbol beside the Key. To edit the Value of a variable, click the pencil edit button beside the Value
To apply changes to variables, and other changes to the VM, click Save
Display VM Events
Related pages
- Definition of Abiquo concepts in Virtual Datacenters View
- Introduction to working with VMs in Manage Virtual Machines