Infrastructure View

Introduction to Infrastructure view

This cloud infrastructure will be offered to the end user as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud.

Abiquo enables you to manage physical infrastructure and public clouds with a multi-datacenter approach, so you can provide virtual infrastructure supported by public clouds and physical infrastructure in different locations.

Click the Infrastructure button  at the top of the screen to access Infrastructure view.

Datacenters and public cloud regions

From the Infrastructure view you can manage datacenters and public cloud regions and their basic infrastructure elements such as networks, racks and physical machines. Abiquo defines a  datacenter as a set of IT resources (servers, networking and external storage) in the same physical location. Abiquo defines a public cloud region as a set of IT resources exposed by a supported cloud provider.

The datacenter hardware or public cloud service will be the backend infrastructure for providing the cloud platform users with compute, storage and network as a service. Cloud administrators can use Abiquo to manage multiple datacenters and public cloud regions so users can deploy their virtual applications in many different locations.

Abiquo uses remote services to manage infrastructure

Remotes Services are applications that perform operations for the Abiquo orchestrator. For example, when you create a volume of external storage in the platform, the orchestrator uses the Storage Manager remote service to communicate with the storage device and request that it create the volume.

The remote services used by Abiquo are described in the following table.

Remote Service	Description
Virtualization Manager	Manages virtual appliance startup and shutdown. Connects to cloud nodes to perform virtual machine operations. Also known as the virtual factory.
Monitor Manager	Performs virtual appliance monitoring. Listens for events occurring in cloud nodes and updates virtual machine state. Also known as the virtual system monitor.
Appliance Manager	Manages the virtual machine templates, appliance library and template repositories.
Discovery Manager	Used to auto-discover physical machines. Retrieves hardware information, hypervisor type, and existing virtual machine information.
Storage Manager	Manages external storage in a standardized way.
Business Process Manager	Performs asynchronous Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) operations, converting virtual machine templates to all hypervisor formats.
DHCP Service	This is the DHCP service used to assign IP addresses and other configuration (static routes, Chef) to the Abiquo managed virtual machines. Since Abiquo 2.0, this service is optional to allow for unmanaged networks.
DHCPv6 Service	This is the DHCP service used to assign IPv6 addresses to the Abiquo managed virtual machines.
Cloud Provider Proxy	Manages public cloud regions and is also used in the Neutron integration.

Remote services required for datacenters and public cloud regions

The following table describes Abiquo remote sevices required for each type of datacenter. The port is a default value only and can be configured as required.

Remote Service	Datacenter	Public Cloud Region	Type in Abiquo	Protocol	Port	Path
Virtualization Manager			VIRTUAL_FACTORY	http://	8009	virtualfactory
Monitor Manager			VIRTUAL_SYSTEM_MONITOR	http://	8009	vsm
Appliance Manager	+ NFS		APPLIANCE_MANAGER	http://	8009	am
Discovery Manager			NODE_COLLECTOR	http://	8009	nodecollector
Storage Manager			STORAGE_SYSTEM_MONITOR	http://	8009	ssm
Business Process Manager			BPM_SERVICE	http://	8009	bpm-async
DHCP Service			DHCP_SERVICE	omapi://	7911
DHCPv6 Service			DHCPv6	omapi://	7911
Cloud Provider Proxy	( for SDN)		CLOUD_PROVIDER_PROXY	http://	8009	cpp

Shared remote services

- Individual remote services required for each datacenter: these remote services CANNOT BE SHARED and each Appliance Manager remote service requires a separate NFS repository to hold the Datacenter Apps Library

- For sharing these remotes services require access to ONE shared remote service Redis instance

- To create an OpenStack cloud region, you must have already registered a cloud provider proxy remote service in Abiquo

Optional DHCP Servers

You can configure virtual machines on unmanaged networks to receive their configuration from a DHCP Server outside the Abiquo Platform. These machines can run in a datacenter without a DHCP Server for the Abiquo platform. On all other types of cloud tenant networks, the DHCP Server is essential to the proper functioning of virtual machine networking.

Apps library for datacenters

In datacenters, Abiquo creates self-service for users through the Apps library, which contains virtual machine templates that are ready to deploy. In private cloud, the Apps library is based on an NFS repository and so Abiquo requires one NFS repository for each Abiquo datacenter. 

For public cloud regions, the Abiquo Apps library is a cache of public cloud template details, so no NFS repository is required.

The following diagram shows the Remote Services servers and NFS repository.

Infrastructure view features

There are two tabs in the left pane:

• Datacenters
• Remote services

These tabs enable you to Manage Datacenters and Public Cloud Regions  

There are three views available in the right pane:

• map view
• statistics view
• details view

Use the view selectors in the top-right corner of the screen to switch between these views.

Datacenter location map

In Infrastructure view, if your Abiquo Server has an Internet connection, a datacenters map can be displayed using Google Maps.

Moving around the map

Zoom in and out using the zoom slider or + and - controls on the top left-hand side of the screen or the mouse. Move across the map using the arrow controls or the mouse, for example, clicking and dragging to the area of the map that interests you. Select from Map with optional terrain or Satellite images with optional labels. It is possible to use Google street view.

Plotting datacenters on the map

When you create datacenters, Abiquo can plot them on the map. If you move the mouse over a datacenter point on the map, Abiquo will display a bubble with its name and location. If you click on a datacenter name in the datacenters list, Abiquo will center the map on that datacenter.. If your datacenters are not plotted on the map, see How to Obtain and Install a Google Maps API Key for information about using Google Maps in Abiquo.

View and modify datacenter details

To open a datacenter to view and edit its resources: servers, network, storage and allocation rules, click on the datacenter name in the Datacenters list. You will need the privileges to view datacenters and also to manage infrastructure elements.

Allow enterprises to use a datacenter

Enterprises must be configured to be allowed to access a datacenter's virtual resources. This is done in Users View, by editing the Enterprise, and configuring Allowed datacenters on the Datacenters tab.

See Manage Enterprises

Allow users to administer a datacenter or public cloud region

By default, an infrastructure administrator such as the cloud admin user can manage all enterprises and datacenters. To restrict the privileges of an administrator to a group of one or more datacenters, use administration Scopes. Note that scopes affect administration of datacenter resources but not use of datacenter resources. If the user's enterprise is allowed to use a datacenter, the user will be able to deploy in that datacenter, even if they do not have administration privileges for it.

View datacenter statistics

If you have the Display resource usage panel privilege, you can see the statistics view for the datacenters you administer.

For a description of the statistics displayed on the resource usage panel, see Infrastructure Statistics

To view the resource usage of a datacenter in the right pane, click on a datacenter name in the Datacenters list in the left pane.

To go back to the infrastructure details view, click the server icon in the top right corner of the screen.