Manage Virtual Datacenters

Cloud Admin	Enterprise Admin	User

What is a Virtual Datacenter

A Virtual Datacenter is an abstraction of a physical Datacenter that offers the same capabilities (such as network infrastructure, external storage system, backup, security, etc) taking the advantatges of the Cloud Computing technology:

• Virtualization
• Pay-as-you-go billing
• Quickly scalability
• Technology and hardware abstraction.

This offers the cloud users the opportunity to run their applications in a more economical and flexible way. A Virtual Datacenter offers the classical Datacenter infrastructure, as a service.

With Abiquo, it is so easy to create, manage and configure Virtual Datacenter instances from the Virtual Datacenters view.

The allowed operations on a Virtual Datacenter are:

Button	Action
	Create a new Virtual Datacenter
	Remove an existing Virtual Datacenter
	Edit the selected Virtual Datacenter

Virtual Datacenter actions configurable The Virtual Datacenter operations can be allowed/denied for specific group of user. In the auth_clientresource database table, the idRole of the ALLOW_VDC_ACTIONS property can have following values: 2(default value): for Cloud Admin, Enterprise Admin and User 3: for Cloud Admin and Enterprise Admin 1: for Cloud Admin only

Creating a Virtual Datacenter

API feature This feature is available in the API. See Virtual Datacenter Resource.

To create a new Virtual Datacenter, click the button and fill the following form:

Allocation limits management

Enterprise Edition Functionality This feature is available in Abiquo Enterprise Edition

Cloud Admin	Enterprise Admin	User

The allocations limit tab provides the System Administrator a way to limit the amount of physical and virtual resources a virtual datacenter will be able to consume. This is very useful to avoid common problems in cloud platforms, such as resource over allocation, avoid a virtual datacenters allocate resources from other virtual datacenters, or even prevent DoS attacks. This limits will also help System Administrators to anticipate to user needs and to preview resource demands.

The exact meaning of this limits is:

• Hard Limit: The maximum amount of virtual resources (RAM, virtual CPU, local Hard Disk, external storage, VLANs and public IPs) that a virtual datacenters will be allowed to consume.
• Soft Limit: This is a limit (always minor than the Hard Limit) used to alert users. When a virtual datacenter reaches the Soft limit, an alert will be shown to users to inform that they are reaching the resource allocation limits for their virtual datacenter.

To manage the virtual datacenter allocation limits click in the tab "Allocation limits" when creating your virtual datacenter and the next control panel will be displayed:

Hard and Soft limits Remember that Soft limits must be always minor than Hard limits. A 0 value in the limits means that there is no limit in resource usage.

VLAN customization

If you select the Custom option for the Private Network configuration, the form will expand and show networking configuration options as shown in the following screenshot:

Once the creation form is filled and submitted, the Virtual Datacenter and the associated VLAN will be created and shown in the Virtual Datacenters view.

After Virtual datacenter creation, VLANs can be managed in the Networking tab as explained in the Manage Networks section.

Viewing DHCP information

The DHCP information that will be used to assign IPs to the Virtual Machines of the Virtual Datacenter, can be viewed by selecting the Virtual Datacenter, clicking the button and selecting the Show DHCP info option.

• In Community Edition, this configuration must be copied manually to your DHCP server.
• In Enterprise Edition, DHCP is automatically configured by the DHCP Remote Service.