Introduction
AbiCloud is an open source infrastructure software for the creation and integral management of Public & Private Clouds based on heterogeneous environments. The tool mainly offers users the capacity for easy scale, management, automatic and immediate provision of servers, storage, networks and virtual network devices as well as applications.
Every company today has need of system architectures that are department or work-group specific.
There are those with products which need to be scaled seasonally. Not being able to attend to these requirements successfully and on demand generates negative feedback from users who will then quite often simply no longer use the product.
With abiCloud, it is possible to provision the needs of these work groups immediately for their environments (development, tests, pre-production,production) and instant de-provisioning when no longer necessary. The infrastructure does not deplete but instead takes advantage of its full capacity and reduces the value chain (provision problems), saves costs in space in the data center, enhances electricity, number of persons dedicated to maintenance, etc.
With the community edition of abiCloud, small companies and start-ups can mount their own Private Cloud and obtain all the benefits that they will attain with abiCloud in a big company or in a Host Provider.
AbiCloud core is distributed under a free software license, hence it is possible to adjust to specific needs, for example Universities, ISVs, SaaS providers, etc. More over, abiCloud has an enterprise edition, plenty of premium features required for companies with extra needs on tis cloud environments.
AbiCloud community edition is a collection of on-line resources for all those that wish to take advantage of open version. Registration is free and does not require any compromise for its ownership.
AbiCloud is a software that allows users with or without experience to manage a pool of servers, a data center or multi-data center environments.
Abiquo is developing an application that facilitates the creation, deployment and management of cloud computing infrastructures, allowing other users to create virtual data centers over the cloud infrastructure. The vision of the tool is summarized as follows:
- Creating private cloud, people can add benefits over their own IT infrastructure.
- An Open platform that allows the easy integration of third party applications (monitoring, security, billing, etc.) in order to facilitate the creation of specific private clouds.
- It will be able to facilitate the integration between clouds (federation).
- It will be able to facilitate the integration with public clouds (Amazon, goGrid, rightspace, etc.) in order to allow the creation.
- Easy to manage, easy to deploy Wherever and Whenever.
- Multiple virtualization technologies has to be supported (virtualBox, Xen, KVM and ESXi on enterprise edition).
In order to cover these issues, abiquo has introduced the following features in the first beta version:
- Infrastructure management: identify your data centers, physical machines, storage systems, public ip, etc. and how your users are working with the cloud infrastructure (detection of the virtual machines). This point allows the internal system management team (Sys admins) to control the infrastructure and simplifies basic management points in the data center.
- User management: This feature agluttinates the creation/modify/delete processes to manage users and enterprises and it's hard and soft limits
- Appliance library: allows the integration of image repositories and preparation of these appliances for their usage by the users in their virtual data centers.
- Virtual Applications: permits final users to create their own virtual data centers and the virtual appliances that run in them.
- Metering: allows to show the events generated by users on the platform (Power-on, power-off, new virtual app, etc.).
This guide will helps the differents roles that interacts with abiCloud to know the functionalities and workflows created for create and manage private clouds. 
