Chrome OS in Abiquo

Chrome OS is the hype of last week. At abiquo we have successfully run chrome OS in our private cloud. We have used the virtual machine made by Mark Renouf. We converted the image to an ESXi image and we’ve added it to our repository space. Here you can see some screenshots:

We’ll upload an image to our repository space in S3 soon.

Easy Install with the New Pre-configured ISO Images

UPDATE: New 1.0.0RC1 pre-configured ISO images available!

From Abiquo 0.7.0 we introduced the Cloud Nodes images as an option to reduce the time to deploy a Cloud Infrastructure. In the new Abiquo 0.8.0 version, we have created a set of openSUSE 11.1 Distros with all the software and libraries you need to deploy a complete Abiquo Cloud Computing Infrastructure.

Abiquo Server Live Installer

An Abiquo Server Live Installer is an openSUSE 11.1 Distro with all the libraries and software bundled in such a way that the set up of a simple Abiquo Infrastructure as a Service deployment is a very simple process almost without any intervention. You have all you need to test drive the platform in a single ISO image. Besides, the linux distribution detects the existing hardware the first time it boots.

At this moment we have these images:

• Abiquo Server openSUSE 11.1 x86 32 bits with VirtualBox 2.2.4 [download] [torrent]: This image install all the software you need to set up an Abiquo Server and a VirtualBox Cloud Node.It’s the right image to test drive the platform if you only have a server available.
• Abiquo Server Lite openSUSE 11.1 x86 32 bits [download] [torrent]: This image install all the software you need to set up an Abiquo Server. It’s the right image to test drive the platform if you have more than one server. You can install it on virtual or physical server, and deploy a Cloud Node in a physical server.

Basically, the installation is a ‘next, next,next’ process, but if you need help this screencast will show you how to do it.

Cloud Node Live Installer

A Cloud Node Live Installer is another set of openSUSE 11.1 Distros with all the libraries and software bundled in such a way that the set up of a Cloud Node is a very simple process. And the linux distribution detects the existing hardware when it boots for the first time.

At this moment we have these images:

• VirtualBox – openSUSE 11.1 x86 32 bits [download] [torrent]
• KVM – openSUSE 11.1 x86 32 bits [download] [torrent]

Again, the installation is a ‘next, next,next’ process, and this screencast can help you.

You can read the full installation process  on the Abiquo Community Wiki. Good luck!

Preconfigured Bare Metal Cloud Node Images Built with SuSestudio

From Abiquo 0.7.0 it’s mandatory to install an application in the servers where the hypervisors VirtualBox, XEN or KVM is executed (Yes, VMware ESXi does not need these small applications). The reason why we now need it is because these hypervisor lacks of some functionality provided by VMware ESXi. So we cover these lacks with our own software. Our goal is to make the dream of Virtual to Virtual (V2V) coming true thanks to our platform. Want to deploy your ESXi virtual images in XEN, KVM or VirtualBox? Abicloud can help with its V2V capabilities.

Some users reported that this change could make harder to deploy a new cloud system. So, we decided in the maintenance release 0.7.1 to offer pre-configured images with the hypervisors and our applications configured ready to run. But we wanted to go one step further: the user should not need to configure the operating system, the drivers, users, permissions… it should be as easy as possible. Almost a bare-metal version.

We have been using a service from openSUSE called SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio is a web front-end to customize and build your own personal distribution in as many ways you could possibly think off. There are other similar services and applications that helps you make custom distribution but none of them are as extensive in customization options as SUSE studio or as easy.

With this service, we created what we called Cloud Node Images. A Cloud Node Image is raw disk image with all the libraries and software bundled in such a way that the set up of a Cloud Node is a very simple process almost without any intervention. Besides, the linux distribution detects the exisiting hardware the first time it boots and expands itself to fill the drive.

At this moment we have these hypervisors and architectures available:

• VirtualBox – openSUSE 11.1 JeOS x86 32 bits [download] [instructions]
• KVM – openSUSE 11.1 JeOS x86 32 bits [download] [instructions]

64bit versions and XEN support will come in future releases. But if you want to test drive our platform, probably this is the fastest way.

You can download it from our community site, in the section Cloud Node Images. We hope this will help to make things easier to anyone who wants to test our platform. If you have some ideas, please let us know!

The appliance manager

In order to understand one of our new cool features, we include a short presentation to understand the concept.

In next weeks we will publish our own public appliance repository.
If you are an appliance provider or a software company that want to distribute your development as a virtual appliance, feel free to contact us and ask for posible colaborations.

OVF Manager with Abiquo

This post is to explain the benefits of OVF standard in the cloud; a little summary of what are, for us, the most important features:

• Allows the easy portability of virtual Appliance between datacenters.
• Supports both single and multi virtual machine configurations.
• It’s independent of the virtualization technology.
• OVF is extensible.

OVF is being and/or will be adopted by the most important players in the cloud market.

Abiquo is designed to work with the OVF standard (nowadays with OVF 1.0 specifications).

Abiquo 0.7.0 release will have the first version of OVF manager, a java library that would be able to be used in other projects.  The main benefits are:

• 1.0 specifications compliance
• complexity abstraction for developers.
• Easy OVF updating process in your code.

This first revision will contain the basic OVF specifications and will be  an important section in our community for developers or other projects interested in collaborating with the library improvements.

Moreover, we are working in other cloud components that work with OVF in order to improve the interoperability between clouds …  information is coming soon :)

And remember,  for questions or doubts,  you know how to contact us ;)

Abiquo Forum is Enabled

Today we wish to announce the opening of  the abiquo forum.

Since we released the first version of the Abiquo platform, many people have sent many questions.  Basic or advanced questions. We think that it’s important to share this information with everybody, to facilitate the introduction of new users to abiquo products.

• A general section will help people to place abiquo announcements, to facilitate users to explain their abiquo experiences and comment on any abiquo post from this blog.
• Moreover,  abiquo Corner simplifies understanding the details of our cloud platform.

You can send your questions in anonymous mode. Although, if you are an abiquo user (from bug tracker or confluence), you can login on to it.

Feel free to ask! Feel free to comment!

Together we will make this project grow!!!!

Support for VMware, Xen and KVM in Abiquo

It has been a week now since we released our open source version of Abiquo. We are totally thrilled with the response of the community. We did not expect that the platform could be downloaded all around the world so fast, and we are starting to get some very good feedback from the people.

One of the recurrent requests are support for VMware and Xen virtualization technologies. The good news are yes, we do support VMware ESX & ESXi, Xen and KVM. And now the not-so-good news, you will have to wait a little bit to download the plugins.

We are a startup and resources are scarce, so the testing and validation of the product is taking longer than expected. No big deal, but both plugins are targeted for enterprise customers, and they have to be reliable and stable to the max.

So, if you are planning to create a Cloud Computing environment with Abiquo using VMware, Xen or KVM virtualization technologies instead or VirtualBox, drop me an email at dparrilla [AT] abiquo .com .

Abiquo for the Internet Service Provider

This presentation aims to explain abiquo in a way that is focused for Internet Services Providers.

Abiquo is a set of tools that will help companies use their IT resources in a much more efficient, scalable and flexible way. And, what’s more important nowadays, will help reducing fixed costs and investment.

Abiquo allows you to create a unique virtual computer with all the company’s hardware (servers, clusters, personal computers and other devices). It also enables you to work with the cloud provider you choose (amazon, rackspace, google…) and obtain computing resources (storage, computation…) in a pay-as-you-go system.

Last but not least, abiquo is Open Source. Anyone can access to the code, adapt it to the company’s requirements, contribute to the community with improvements and add extra applications and functionalities.