Abiquo for VMware vCloud Director improves your Multicloud Experience.
Connect VMware vCloud Director and Abiquo and get the most from your existing cloud management software.
Abiquo for VMware vCloud Director
Take vCloud Director features a step further
Have you invested in vCloud Director, but now need auto-scaling, multi-cloud capabilities or metering? Add Abiquo’s cloud management platform to your existing solution to get the functionalities you need.
vCloud Director 9.0 includes features such a new enhanced User Interface, Multi-site Management, Distributed Logical Router and VM Monitoring and Metrics, Architecture Changes and Networking and storage enhancements. Add Abiquo on top and get the most of all new vCloud Director features. Combine the provision SDDC services offered by vCloud Director plus the extra cloud management capabilities of Abiquo and bring your Cloud Computing experience to the next level.
Advanced Multi-Tenant Cloud Capabilities
Add with Abiquo a single point of security for your multi cloud environment. Enjoy the ability to manage multiple clouds without compromising security and administer user access to all clouds through the same platform, reducing overhead and risk when your team changes.
Flexible Cloud Pricing Model
Abiquo offers you a flexible cloud pricing model through which you can customize your cloud pricing per datacenter for a whole range of resources, also available for all public, private and hybrid clouds. For each datacenter, you can set separate prices, and use different currencies, and you can set cost codes for Virtual Machine image templates. Use this for internal chargeback or customer cloud billing. Reseller tiered pricing is supported too.
Cloud Workflow System
Cloud Workflow for all clouds lets you keep the IT control your organisation needs while empowering users. The Abiquo cloud workflow feature controls the deploy, reconfiguration and removal of virtual machines (VMs) and virtual appliances (VApps). When a user requests a deploy, reconfigure or undeploy, your organization may require an automatic or manual intervention. The Abiquo cloud workflow feature can suspend user tasks, send details of them to a cloud workflow connector (which will interact with a workflow tool), and wait for a response. Our free email approval tool will get you started immediately.
Rich REST API
One integration point for all your cloud infrastructure, whether it’s private, public or hybrid. The perfect way to use DevOps tools without having to rewrite for each cloud you want to use. Easily integrate your existing VCloud Director services consistently into Abiquo through our API. Your business will be able to automate and control your processes via the API, providing your business the ease and flexibility to make d decisions today that will not limit your business in the future.
VM Monitoring and Metrics
Abiquo’s Cloud Metrics tab provides an overview of the resources an enterprise is using on the cloud management platform. The tab contains 6 different panels including information about the resources used by a workload, such as CPU, RAM, disk I/O and network traffic. You can also use Abiquo collectd plugin which allows collection of application and OS metrics. All collected metrics are shows graphically to your users and can drive the automation and scaling system.
Multi Cloud
Manage all your multi cloud resources (public, private or hybrid) from one place. Add Abiquo to your vCloud Director software without interrupting service.
Friendly User Interface
Consistency across all clouds: Get the benefits of hybrid cloud management faster than ever with Abiquo’s unified portal. Using a familiar drag-and-drop method to deploy Virtual Machines (VMs), and supported by built-in tutorials, users can get started within minutes with little or no training.
It’s easy to customise the interface to match your business – Abiquo can be fully white-labelled, and can even run multiple brands on the same platform to support reseller scenarios. Custom roles and access scopes ensure your users can only perform the tasks appropriate to their job, maintaining IT control where you need it. Your business will enjoy the increased productivity, consistency and control offered by appliance blueprints, setting policies and centralised controls on usage and metering of that usage limits.
App Templates and Template Mobility
Build once and deploy anywhere with Abiquo’s virtual appliance templates and template mobility. We take care of setting up networking, firewalls, storage and so on, making it easy for your users to choose the best venue for their application. You can control this with scopes too!
Optimization Tools
The new Optimization tab will help you make best use of your VMWare VCloud Director resources and save money on your public cloud fees. Abiquo has created 7 different panels that will give you real-time information about the highest and lowest CPU and RAM usage, the VM’s with the highest uptime on the platform and the unused public IP’s and load balancers. Detailed reporting is also available.
VM Lifecycle Automation
Abiquo also brings advanced multi cloud features, such as application and schedule driven auto scaling to vCloud Director, just as it does for vCenter, Azure and many other clouds. Virtual machine action plans and task schedules enable users to create a series of virtual machine tasks and save it as an action plan, then schedule that plan to run based on a monitoring event (such as high CPU or RAM utilization), at a defined time or on a schedule. You can also configure alerts, with their associated alarms.
Abiquo’s extended integration with vCloud Director
Abiquo has been working hard to consolidate and extend the integration with vCloud Director. As in previous versions, Abiquo onboards Virtual Appliances (vApps) from vCloud Director as Virtual Datacenters (VDCs) where you can create Virtual Machines (VMs) using templates from the vCloud Director template repository.
With Abiquo you can now hot reconfigure VMs if their vCloud Director templates and operating systems allow it, and the platform will now use the VMXNET3 ethernet driver by default for VMWare vCloud Director.
Users can work with Virtual Machine templates with multiple disks, although the platform still represents these as a single disk with the total size of all disks. When you onboard a Virtual Machine, Abiquo creates a temporary template. To create a valid template, users clone the Virtual Machine (VM) disks to create an instance and the cloud platform now automatically updates the Virtual Machine template to make it available to deploy. So users can then undeploy and redeploy the onboarded Virtual Machine.
Abiquo onboards and synchronizes private and external networks, although you must create static routes and NAT configurations directly in vCloud Director.
As in the previous versions of Abiquo, you can onboard existing Edge firewalls from vCloud Director as Classic firewalls in Abiquo. Do not create vCloud Director security groups for VMs because they are not supported in the platform.
In vCloud Director, load balancers can span more than one Virtual Appliance (VApp), and Abiquo supports load balancers that span Abiquo Virtual Datacenters (VDCs). When you create a load balancer for vCloud Director, you must select a “public address” on an external network connected to the Edge (meaning external to the OrgVDC or external routed networks). The cloud management platform does not support private subnets for load balancers in vCloud Director, or NSX-Edge Compact or fenced vApps. You can onboard compatible load balancers.
For details of the vCloud Director features that Abiquo supports, visit Abiquo’s wiki.
Group vCloud Director regions by endpoint
WIth Abiquo on top, regions can be grouped by endpoint. This is an extension of the previous Abiquo feature to group regions by provider. It is configured with the same UI settings that allow Administrators to work with groups of regions or specific regions when allowing tenants access to a provider, and when creating, editing, viewing scopes, and so on.
Support for Administrator credentials for managing vCloud Director in Abiquo
Previously, organization credentials enabled administrators to create one public cloud region for each vCloud Director organization. Now you can also optionally create a single public cloud region using the vCloud Director (vCD) Administrator credentials, and then add the vCloud Director Organization credentials for each enterprise and multiple enterprises can use that region.
Management of vCloud Director VApp networks
Abiquo offers support for isolated networks but also the option to allow them to connect to the outside through an external network address.
Improvements on the onboarding of existing workloads on a Vapp
Previously Abiquo could only import VApps if there was one Virtual Machine per vCloud Virtual Appliance but now you can synchronize the Virtual Appliances in the public cloud region as Abiquo Virtual Dataceneters (VDCs).
Abiquo synchronizes a vCloud Director Virtual Appliance network as a private network and users can also manage private networks.
