Abiquo launched the latest version of its award-winning software in December 2018
With the abilities to deliver VM auto-scaling on any cloud, schedule workload actions, create application blueprints and deploy them to multiple cloud infrastructures, set up application and workload monitoring and offer different storage SLAs to different tenant groups, Abiquo customers can meet their tenants’ needs and differentiate their services even further.
Abiquo 4.2 is intended to help users and cloud admins to get more from the hybrid cloud, by presenting usage information in useful new ways. Of course there are new technical features too, including support for configuring NAT with VMWare NSX, more granular configuration for software defined network firewall rules, new workload placement policies for clustered hypervisors and additional information displayed for self-service backups.
Keep on reading to find out the main improvements in Abiquo 4.2, and to learn more about our new release check the complete release notes here.
New dashboard widgets
Abiquo’s home view now has 3 tabs to give more visibility into hybrid cloud resources and how they’re utilized.
The new Optimization tab will help make best use of resources and may save money on your public cloud fees. The 7 different panels display real-time information about the highest and lowest CPU and RAM usage across your VMs, identify the VMs with the highest uptime on the platform and any unused public IP’s and load balancers. Click through to the resource to manage it directly.
Multi cloud, one remote console
Abiquo integrates Apache Guacamole for unified remote console to all cloud VMs. The new Guacamole integration offers a single solution for unified remote access across providers, supporting consoles using VNC, RDP, and SSH. This means that users don’t need to know about the connection mechanism for the cloud platform on which the VM is running, Abiquo takes care of that and presents the same console interface for all underlying clouds.
Self-service backup additional information
There is a new Backup policies tab on the VM control panel, where users can quickly access backup information for that VM. Other backup information is enhanced too:
- Display backup expiration date in the list of backups for a VM
- Display the site where the backup is done (backup destination)
- Show if a backup is a normal backup or a replica
- Disable the restore link for the replicas
Making life easier for administrators
For administrators with many hosts it can be hard to find a particular VM. Using Abiquo’s support for multiple clouds, multiple hypervisors, clusters and datacenters can compound this challenge. A new tab in the Infrastructure view ensures Admins can view and manage all VMs across their estate. The tab displays all workloads at the Infrastructure level, not just per hypervisor and allows filtering and searching.
The new wildcard search also extends to other search boxes across the platform, for Admins and users alike.
Abiquo 4.2 includes the ability to exclude customer network ranges. In a private cloud datacenter, to prevent users from creating private networks that use a certain network address range, you can reserve the range by creating an excluded network.
Additional network configuration to simplify firewall policies
The firewalls per network feature enables networks to be configured without applying firewall policies. This can make configuration of VMs with private and public networks much easier, avoiding the need to create “any/any” firewall rules for private networks.