Integration with BILLmanager

BILLmanager is a multifunctional tool intended to manage sales and reselling of hosting, domain, SSL certificate and XaaS services.  

Using BILLmanager enables to sell dedicated servers to customers in automatic mode.  Key features of the billing system include: 

• customer registration and payments tracking; 
• service tariffs setup; 
• customer payments handling;  
• automatic service management: open, suspend, extend services. 

Operation principles

Forming a list of available servers

When a client orders a dedicated server, the billing platform connects to DCImanager 6 and receives a list of all servers. The configuration of the server ordered by the client is compared with the configuration of available servers. Available servers are considered to be servers for which all conditions are met:

• the server has no owner;
• diagnostics are completed — all checks were successful and the configuration is defined;
• the status of the last server operation is ok or canceled — DCImanager 6 completed the last server task without errors or canceled it;
• the server is not in maintenance mode. For more information, see the Maintenance Mode;
• the server is in operation;
• the server has a unique MAC address;
• the server has no diagnostic and status errors — if there are errors, the provider can ignore them and provide the server to the client at his own risk. For more details, see Running Diagnostics.

If an available server with a suitable configuration is found, server preparation starts. Otherwise, a server with the most similar configuration is selected, and a task to build this server is created.

Changing service statuses

If a service is in the Active status in BILLmanager and the corresponding server is turned off in DCImanager 6, the billing platform will turn it on.

If a service in BILLmanager has the status Stopped and in DCImanager 6 the server is turned on, the billing platform will send a request to turn off the server.

Stopping a service

When a service is stopped, DCImanager 6 will shut down the switch ports to which the server is connected. The service will not be stopped if the switch ports are not specified in the server settings.

Deleting a service

When you delete a service, the integration module performs the following actions:

1. Enables the switch ports to which the server is connected.
2. Turns on the server if it is turned off.
3. Stops an operation on the server if it is running.
4. Removes IP addresses from the server configuration.
5. Deletes the owner of the DCImanager 6 server.
6. Runs diagnostics with the disk cleanup option.
7. Shuts down the server.
8. Turns off the switch ports to which the server is connected.

Preparing for integration

Configuring pools

Create pools of IP addresses in DCImanager 6, which will be assigned to servers when they are provisioned and released. To do this:

1. Enter Network → IP pools.
2. Press Pool general settings.
3. Select the Pools for deallocation of servers.
4. Select the Pools for allocation of servers.
   
5. Press Save.

You can select a pool from which addresses will be assigned when issuing servers from a particular rack: go to Racks → select rack → menu  → Edit → select IP pool → Save.

Configuring scripts

To set the DCImanager 6 script to be available for ordering as additional software, select All for the Access to script parameter. Read more in Scripts.

Configuring integration

Integration configuration takes place on BILLmanager's side. For integration:

1. Connect the processing module "DCImanager 6". Read more in the article Processing module. DCImanager 6 (BILLmanager documentation).
   
2. Configure a tariff for "Dedicated server" product. Read more in the article Tariff plan. DCImanager 6 (BILLmanager documentation).

Once the customer has ordered the service, BILLmanager sends an API request to DCImanager 6 to setup the dedicated server.  The service is considered opened (given the status "Active" in BILLmanager), when DCImanager 6 has completed the setup procedure.