This guide has been written to help System Administrators understand all the system characteristics and configuration details required to install and manage the Abiquo Platform.

We recommend reading the User's Guide alongside this document to help you understand the concepts of IaaS as offered by our Platform.

Requirements

When planning an Abiquo installation, check the requisites in the links below first.

• Network
• Private cloud providers
• Storage servers

Then you must install the essential base configuration described here before you install the Abiquo platform servers.

Required knowledge

Some essential system administration skills required for managing the cloud platform are as follows.

• CentOS/RedHat Linux expertise for maintaining the Abiquo servers, which are Linux servers
• Computer and network security expertise is required to configure and maintain the cloud platform
• Advanced hypervisor knowledge including virtual machine templates 
• Networking including design, switch configuration, VLAN and DHCP
• Storage including hypervisor datastores, NFS/CIFS and iSCSI storage

User interface

Abiquo UI requires a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768 for productive work. It is based on HTML5 and you must use browsers that support these HTML5 features:

• Forms block
• Drag and drop

The infrastructure map uses Google Maps and the Google Maps Javascript v3 API. See How to Obtain and Install a Google Maps API Key.

For platforms that are isolated or do not require Google Maps, it can be disabled in the Abiquo UI.

The following browsers are compatible with the Abiquo UI.

For mobile devices, check if your browser is compatible with HTML5 using a test such as https://html5test.com/

Backups

Abiquo supports VM backups through integrations with datacenter backup software.

LDAP

Abiquo supports the following LDAP implementations:

• Windows Server 2012
• Windows Server 2008R2
• Windows Server 2008
• Windows Server 2003
• ApacheDS
• OpenLDAP 2.4

OpenID

Abiquo has an integration with OpenID Connect that allows the platform to leverage single sign on authentication and federated authorization features.

The integration targets the core spec, but also implements some features such as the  RP-Initiated-Logout  from the optional Session Management spec.

The scope of this integration does not include discovery, dynamic registration, and other optional features.

Chef Integration

Abiquo Chef Integration requires a Chef server or hosted Chef. Chef requires time synchronization between your servers and hypervisors.

The Abiquo Chef Integration was designed to support Linux VMs. In datacenters, from Abiquo 4.0.2, the Abiquo Chef Integration requires templates that are compatible with cloud-init to pass parameters to VMs.