Represented by the orange network in the above diagram, the Cloud Cluster Network connects the Virtual Images of the Cloud. Application and Services delivery traffic will use this network. Hence, Virtual Machines created with Abiquo use this network to communicate with each other. For example, a Java application running in Virtual Machine X can connect to Virtual Machine Y that runs a MySQL server using this network.
Abiquo manages this network at two different levels:
- Range of IPs of each Virtual Datacenter. Every Virtual Datacenter has a different subnet configuration to avoid IP overlapping and guarantee isolation. Future versions of Abiquo will support 802.11q as well.
- IP and MAC address binding at deployment time. When a Virtual Machine is created, Abiquo generates a unique MAC address and binds it to an IP from the Virtual Datacenter subnet. Abiquo can also manage ISC DHCP Servers, and it guarantees that the DHCP server will always lease the configured IP to the MAC address assigned to the Virtual Machine.
Abiquo can manage DHCP servers remotely. So, Virtual Images networking do not need to be configured manually: it can be configured through DHCP. It's important to mention that this DHCP server should be reachable from the Virtual Machines to obtain the IP leases.
In the diagram, we can read that the IP range starts in 10.0.0.x. It's possible to configure the initial Class A network.
Abiquo recommends more than a 1Gbit NIC per host for this network. Depending on the number of Virtual Machines in the host, you will need to add more NICs. As a rule of thumb, size this network changes according to the size of the number of Virtual Machines that can handle your host.
