Auto scaling for every cloud, vCloud Director integration, Firewalls and Load Balancers for Azure with Abiquo 4.0
Version 4.0 of the Abiquo hybrid cloud solution introduces new major features:
- Auto scaling for ANY cloud
- Trigger action plans from monitoring data
- vCloud Director support
- Azure Firewalls and Load Balancers
- Hardware profiles, per tenant, for private clouds
- Advanced reseller hierarchies
- AWS networking improvements
- Updated OpenStack Neutron integration for KVM
- Cloud-init for Hyper-V and XenServer
Auto-Scaling for ANY cloud
The new Abiquo version 4.0 delivers auto scaling for ANY cloud, building on earlier developments in our class-leading cloud management platform. Driven by our mature monitoring system, Action Plans from version 3.10 and extending the reach of cloud-init and Chef functionality, auto scaling enables users to build consistent infrastructure and application-driven scaling groups and control them by schedule too. Set up the same application monitoring and scaling rules for ESX, KVM, Hyper-V, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, vCloud Director, OpenStack… whatever you need!
Trigger workload Action Plans from monitoring data
Abiquo 3.10 introduced Action Plans, sets of automated actions which could be applied to a workload (such as add RAM/CPU, restart, shutdown, send a mail) based on a schedule. Abiquo 4.0 extends the Action Plan functionality by adding the ability to trigger an Action Plan based on monitoring information gathered from the infrastructure, public cloud or from a workload OS and application. This is fully integrated into the Auto-Scaling feature, which is itself an Action Plan related to a scaling group.
vCloud Director Support
Azure Firewalls and Load Balancers
Abiquo 4.0 introduces firewall policies and load balancer policies for Azure ARM. Abiquo ensures that the user can only create firewalls or load balancers that are compatible with Microsoft Azure ARM. This functionality is also available for VMware NSX, OpenStack Neutron and AWS.
Hardware profiles for private cloud
Abiquo v4.0 introduces Abiquo hardware profiles in private cloud. 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. This is useful for certain operating systems and applications which require fixed combinations of CPU and RAM, and also mirrors the configuration method used by cloud providers such as AWS, thus enabling a consistent user experience across cloud types. Use of hardware profiles is optional, and is configured per tenant in each datacenter for total flexibility. It can also be configured for vCloud Director regions.
Advanced reseller hierarchies
Abiquo 4.0 also introduces scope hierarchies for resource sharing. A scope hierarchy is for sharing resources with related tenants without the need for the administrator to have all of these related tenants in their own scope. So administrators can share VM templates and VApp specs with tenants in child scopes beneath their own scope, but administrators manage only the tenants within their own scope.
The scope hierarchy feature is optional: you can just create a single level of scopes at the same level as the global scope as in previous versions of Abiquo. The scope hiearchy feature is also flexible, because an enterprise can belong to more than one scope, which means that an administrator could create an enterprise hierarchy for sharing, as well as more scopes for sharing templates of a specific type only with groups of tenants that will use those templates.
AWS networking improvements
In the updated AWS integration, Abiquo v4.0 now configures VPC networking Scenario 2 as described in the AWS documentation, introducing NAT support with a public subnet and allowing virtual machines on different subnets to be connected to the same load balancer.
In previous versions of Abiquo, the virtual machines connected to a load balancer had to be located in the same subnet as the load balancer, and in Abiquo v4.0 this restriction has been removed for the AWS integration. As a result of this change, users can create a load balancer in the public subnet to balance across virtual machines in private subnets.
Improved OpenStack Neutron integration for KVM
Abiquo 4.0 introduces an improved OpenStack Neutron integration for KVM with full support for virtual machine firewalls, configured through the normal Abiquo UI – and Abiquo KVM now runs on CentOS 7. This presents a great opportunity to reduce infrastructure costs by using open source components without sacrificing user functionality.
Cloud-init for Hyper-V and XenServer
Abiquo 4.0 introduces virtual machine networking improvements that facilitate automation.
Cloud-init is now also available on XenServer, Hyper-V and Oracle VM, in addition to ESXi.
When the user is working with cloud-init compatible templates, if no DHCP server is available, Abiquo will use cloud-init to inject the network configuration into the virtual machine. And Abiquo will also inject the SSH key configured for the user, enabling users to connect to the VM with SSH without password authentication, which is more secure and automation friendly.
Notes to editors:
Please contact Abiquo on +44 (0) 203 1510900 / marketing@abiquo.com