Tip Tuesday: Getting clever with metering

A quick look at the Abiquo user interface makes it easy for our users to meter and charge for compute, storage and network resources of various types.

Abiquo’s interactive user interface makes metering easy!

But did you know that you can meter your customers’ usage at a more granular level?

Lets take a look at the levels at which you can meter usage with Abiquo:

Hypervisor Type
Abiquo tracks which machine is deployed on which hypervisor, so for those for which you have to pay a license fee, like VMware ESX, you can charge the customer appropriately. Where you have a lower cost of ownership, such as KVM, you could reduce the charge. You can use this, and the reporting of it, to enhance sales engagement and advise your customer of the best platform for the workload.

Here is a list of the hypervisor technologies that Abiquo supports.

Reserved Machine
Abiquo lets you dedicate a physical machine to an Enterprise, creating what you might call a “virtual private cloud” in your shared infrastructure. You can combine this with dedicated storage tiers and even physical networks, but more of that another time. You can also let customers choose whether to use these dedicated machines or a shared resource, and meter for the usage of those reserved machines.

Anti-Affinity 
Using anti-affinity (preventing selected virtual machines from running on the same physical machine) reduces the efficiency of your platform, so you may want to charge extra for it. In a self-service environment your customers can configure their own anti-affinity rules through Abiquo Layers, which works on all our supported hypervisors, not just VMware. We meter use of Anti-affinity layers so you can charge for it.

VM Template Cost Codes
In the App Library template configuration you can assign cost codes to templates. These are configured through the pricing screens. You can then use these for all kinds of billing and reporting purposes; charging by OS, maybe just for customers with a managed service; charging by application, if your templates contain pre-configured applications; charging for use of Chef, for example.

 Have a look at the Abiquo Wiki for more information on clever charging!

Contact us here if you have any questions.

Tip Tuesday: Don’t be scared of self-service!

A key characteristic of a cloud solution is self-service – allowing the cloud consumer to provision their computing capabilities without the intervention of an administrator. Many IT administrators will shudder at the thought of providing the user with a full self service experience.

                                                                                                                     Frightened IT- guy meme

Abiquo helps here by providing self service to the cloud consumers, whilst allowing the cloud administrator, or infrastructure owner to remain in complete control. Abiquo’s controlled self service is delivered through several different features:

1. The Cloud administrator controls which logical pools of private resource (Abiquo data centers), or public cloud regions any tenant (Abiquo enterprise) can use

2. The cloud administrator sets resource limits to control how much resource a tenant can use in any one datacenter. Read how to do this here.

3. The cloud administrator defines allocation rules, so that when a consumer deploys through self service the administrator has control over where the workload is provisioned and how the infrastructure is utilised.

4. Finally how the consumers self service capabilities are controlled by over 56 separate privileges (that can be grouped into roles), that define what information can be viewed in the Abiquo UI, and what tasks the user can perform. By configuring roles the  cloud administrator can delegate as much (or as little) self-service as required.

Watch to learn more about self-service and other Abiquo features. Contact us for more information or visit the Abiquo Wiki

Tip Tuesday: Take Control of your Cloud Resources

Many organisations are wary of the agility that comes with cloud services and rightly so! They feel that they will no longer have control over users who now have access  to self service, outside the constraints of normal IT controls. Abiquo helps you deliver those cloud services, so that your users have the benefits of self service, whilst allowing you to remain in complete control.

Resource limits can be set for all of your cloud resources (compute, memory, storage and networking) for each cloud tennant. Those same resource limits can also be applied at a more granular Virtual DataCenter, or physical data center level, if required. Meaning that the cloud provider remains in complete control of anyone who can using that resources and where in the infrastructure those resources can be used. All of Abiquo’s resource limits contain a hard limit, that cannot be exceeded and a soft limit that can generate warnings or alerts to both the end user, or the administrator, or even the sales guy.

                                                                                    Abiquo Resource Limits

With v2.6, Abiquo has extended its capabilities to include AWS EC2. The same control of resources now applies to the public cloud, with the cloud administrator controlling how much resource can be used in each AWS region, and therefore controlling how much can be spent. Here are the limits you can set in an Amazon Virtual Datacenter in Abiquo:

                                                Setting resource limits in your Amazon environment with Abiquo

Download Abiquo now to take control of your cloud resources!

Tip Tuesday: Providing Tiered Storage to Cloud Users

When it comes to storage one size most definitely does NOT fit all. There are a huge number of storage solutions on the market each offering their own benefits and price points. For those running applications the choice of storage is typically a balance between performance or features versus cost. Often the application itself will dictate which of those carries the most weight.

For the cloud provider it is a matter of offering a selection of storage solutions so that you can service the different needs of your customers. Of course, you may also want to control which solutions are made available to specific customers based on the SLA’s that you are offering.

Abiquo makes this incredibly simple. Offering the ability to create storage tiers and control which tenants have access each of those tiers. Therefore allowing the Cloud provider the ability to offer a range of storage services.

                                                                                                                     Abiquo Storage Tiers

Within the storage tiers Abiquo offers several different storage types that provide the Cloud provider with multiple options based on their existing infrastructure and customer needs. Including:

• Integrated iSCSi – storage integration with leading storage platforms such as NetApp and Nexenta, offering the full Abiquo self service storage functionality to cloud users

• Generic iSCSi – supporting any iSCSi based storage and allowing the storage administrator to remain in control over how storage is provisioned to cloud users

• NFS – providing Abiquo self service storage functionality on any storage platform that supports NFS

Click for more information on storage options and to see Abiquo in action!