Virtualization Magazine

Abiquo on Monday announced the general availability of Abiquo 1.8, the latest version of its flagship Enterprise Cloud Management solution. Abiquo 1.8 furthers Abiquo's lead in allowing enterprises to coordinate virtual and physical infrastructure management by adding Cisco Unified Computing System as a device category in the physical inventory for hosts, and by supporting the Cisco Nexus 1000v switch. In addition, Abiquo 1.8 advances its leadership in business policy based Enterprise Cloud Management with completely configurable role-based access control, LDAP-based user authentication, as well as a vendor-neutral, automatic VM restart capability that allows enterprises deploying multi-hypervisor datacenters to have a cost-effective, consistent and predictable high availability mechanism.

Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm noted that Abiquo has built its "business by offering a solution built to fit the enterprise customer, not forcing the customer to fit our solution. We started by being the first company to offer support for all major hypervisors, and Abiquo 1.8 shows that we continue to innovate based on that premise.

"Enterprises need to be able to discover and manage physical infrastructure directly, not in an abstract way through a hypervisor, which is what our competitors espouse," Malcolm continued. "Abiquo 1.8 advances this vision and delivers enterprise-class cloud management for even more control of critical cloud computing resources."

Abiquo Support for Cisco
Abiquo 1.8 supports discovery and power management for the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). Specifically, the new version adds a new category to the Abiquo physical inventory for Cisco UCS chassis and blades. This allows an entire Cisco UCS to be added and managed as a single device. All Cisco blades that are part of Cisco UCS deployments are discovered and added to physical inventory. In addition, Cisco UCS modules can be individually power managed.

Abiquo 1.8 also supports any vSphere environment that uses the Cisco Nexus 1000v or VMware Distributed Virtual (DVS) switches. Support for these virtual switches allows customers to utilize all Abiquo value-added features without loss of vSphere functionality, providing for extended virtual machine mobility in VMware vSphere environments.

Stronger Policy-Based Cloud Management
Abiquo 1.8 deepens its role-based access control by providing the ability to define an unlimited number of individual user roles, and to assign any combination of privileges, selected from a comprehensive range, to each. This provides infinitely granular control of user permissions. In addition, Abiquo 1.8 delivers integration with any LDAP directory, such as Windows Active Directory, so enterprises can manage Abiquo users entirely through any LDAP directory, including Active Directory.

"Abiquo has been an important part of our strategic initiative to manage the needs of our clients focused on cloud-hosted technology implementations," said Geoff Cubitt, president and chief technology officer of Roundarch, an Abiquo enterprise customer. "It's apparent that they don't build a one-size-fits-all solution for enterprise cloud management and have the needs of their customers in mind as they continue building functionality into their solution. Abiquo's continuous innovation helps us develop the best possible solutions for our clients."

Other Key Features Added to Abiquo 1.8
In addition to these major features, Abiquo 1.8 further extends its managed storage volume capabilities, adds secure virtual machine console connections, extends its API functionality for all newly introduced features, provides configurable host reservation to allow deployment flexibility, adds accounting enhancements, and further improves the user experience through its award winning GUI.