Overview of the Abiquo Storage Model
The following diagram gives an overview of the Abiquo Storage Model.
Elements of the Abiquo Storage Model
The Abiquo Storage Model consists of the following elements:
Appliance Library
The Appliance Library is contained on the NFS Repository. The NFS Repository is a simple NFS shared folder that can be hosted on almost all machines. There is one NFS Repository per physical datacenter in Abiquo.
The Appliance Library contains:
- Virtual machine images that users will deploy in the cloud
- Virtual machine image conversions generated by Abiquo for all hypervisor types
- Virtual machine instances, which are snapshot copies of virtual machines running in the cloud
Virtual Storage
Virtual Storage consists of virtual block devices that can be mounted on virtual machines. The Virtual Machines see these volumes as physical disks and they can be attached through the Abiquo GUI and the API.
Virtual storage types:
- Managed Storage, providing users with Storage as a Service
- Generic iSCSI Storage, providing users with preconfigured volumes
Virtual storage contains:
- Virtual volumes of user data
- Persistent virtual machines
Hypervisor Datastore
A Hypervisor Datastore is mounted on the hypervisor and registered in Abiquo. At deployment, the hypervisor API or Abiquo AIM copies the virtual disk image from the Appliance Library to the hypervisor datastore. For this reason, Abiquo recommends separating the Appliance Library and the hypervisor datastore.
A hypervisor datastore contains:
- Non-persistent virtual machine system disks.
