Everything Under Control

Setting Up a Cloud Front End

The openQRM cloud plugin provides a fully automated server provisioning workflow with its own web portal. External users can register with this portal in a self-service action, or they can be added manually by the administrator. Depending on their group assignments, users can then submit cloud orders. Depending on the configuration, these orders can be manually or automatically released – openQRM autonomously takes care of the complete provisioning workflow.

The process of setting up a cloud front end is described in a how-to online [5]. The basic setup of the service is handled in the plugin manager below Cloud | Configuration | Main Config . You need to configure at least the following settings:

cloud_admin_email - openQRM administrator's email address
auto_provision - true
show_private_image - true

You can optionally modify the following parameters at this point:

• external_portal_url: Enter an external DNS/domain name for the cloud portal.
• cloud_currency: Choose whether to show the cloud currency for the users in US dollars or euros.
• cloud_1000_ccus: IMAP the virtual cloud currency, CCU, to hard cash.
• vm_loadbalance_algorithm: Load-balancing algorithm for virtual machines; for example,   = Load, 1 = Memory, 2 = Random, 3 = first available host until the virtual machine limit is reached.

In the course of the configuration, you then create the cloud products, which users can later book with their access credentials, and define the user groups, prices, and billing mode for resources booked via the cloud portal. End users can reach the cloud portal on http://server_ IP_address/cloud-portal/ .

Backing Up and Restoring

"Keep it simple" is the way to go for backing up and restoring an openQRM environment. Because an openQRM installation only consists of files in the database; all you need to do is back up these two components for the worst case. Basically, that just means copying all the files below /usr/share/openqrm, along with a dump of the MySQL database from openQRM to a safe place. You can do this as root with the following commands:

cp -aR /usr/share/openqrm /usr/share/openqrm-5.2.before-update
mysqldump openqrm -p > /usr/share/openqrm-5.2.before-update/openqrm-db-5.2.sql

You are interactively prompted for the root password for the database for the MySQL dump. Restoring just means moving the original directory and copying the backup files and database dump that you created previously back to the original location before restarting the openQRM services.

That said, the state-backup feature gives you an even easier approach; it automatically backs up all of the configuration files and the database content with a single command:

/usr/share/openqrm/bin/openqrm state backup -n 5.2.before-update

The following command lists all backups created in this way:

/usr/share/openqrm/bin/openqrm state list
5.2.3.before-update-05-06-15_09.14.20
Test-State-Backup-05-24-15_13.09.05

To restore the system configuration from the Test-State-Backup-05-24-15_13.09.05, you would just enter the command shown in Listing 1.

/usr/share/openqrm/bin/openqrm state restore -n Test-State-Backup-05-24-15_13.09.05
openQRM-server: Restoring server state from /var/spool/openqrm-state/Test-State-Backup-05-24-15_13.09.05.tgz
Restoring the openQRM-database from /usr/share/openqrm/database.sql

Licensing and Prices

The openQRM Enterprise Edition license is based on a perpetual model; in other words, you can still continue to use licenses after your maintenance agreement has expired. A server license always comprises a license for the openQRM host and client licenses for managing one client each (=physical hosts). The price includes maintenance (updates and bugfixes) and support for 12 months. Client licenses for integrating further hosts can be purchased at any time.

The following editions of openQRM Enterprise are currently offered:

• SMB Edition Datacenter and IaaS MultiCloud 5.2, for small to medium-sized enterprises with one or multiple system administrators, EUR2,000.
• Large Edition Datacenter and IaaS MultiCloud 5.2, for organizations with a team of system administrators, including centralized user management (LDAP/AD), EUR4,000.
• Enterprise Edition Datacenter and IaaS MultiCloud 5.2, for enterprises with one or multiple data centers, a team of system administrators and connections to e-commerce platforms, including centralized user management (LDAP/AD), EUR7,000.

In some areas, openQRM additionally offers a hardware bundle with preinstalled SuperMicro hardware and installation support. Check out the website [6] for details.