Abiquo

Abiquo: More than a cloud veneer 

It appears Abiquo has all the pre-requsit features one would expect from a cloud veneer. It sits infront of a virtual environment and provides self-provisioning cloud features to customers.  As you would expect from such a product, it supports many hypervisors: VMWARE, XEN, XenServer, KVM, Hyper-V, and Virtual Box. It has a service catalog with standard templates, shared/community templates, and customer owned templates. It has resource limits controlling how much any one customer is allowed to consume. It has LDAP integration for authentication. It includes the ability to create private networks and allows customer branding. It seems to have nailed the basics.  But what makes Abiquo stand out?

The ease of implementation provides an interesting argument for Abiquo.  During installation, Abiquo will scan an address range and look for hosts. It will add the hosts it finds to its console. It will then scan the hosts for virtual machines and allow the installer to easily add those virtual machines to the console too. This allows Abiquo to be installed quickly into an existing virtual environment.

Abiquo has detailed resource limits that can implement controls down to the number of CPU’s, amount of memory, number of public IP Addresses, and more.  In addition to providing storage from the virtual environment for cloud consumption, Abiquo can use Netapp API’s to provide Storage As A Service and tiered storage (with different pricing per tier). Abiquo uses rules and algorithms to determine virtual machine placement. And finally, Albiquo comes with built-in V2V so that virtual machines may be moved between competing hypervisors.

In the end, Abiquo is a step ahead of other products in its class (such as Cloudstack and Openstack), and can serve as a low cost replacement for vCloud Director.