vCD metering

[rkleijwegt]

Hi guys,

I'm looking for advice on how to do metering in an vCD environment for chargeback purposes.

In a plain vSphere environment I would simply take a list of VMs and group them per customer, project or department under a VM folder. Then I would enumerate all the VMs and create charges for them according to the amount of vCPU and vRAM assigned. For storage I would create charges depending on what storage tier is backing the datastores the VMs are stored on.

However in a vCD environment you not only have VMs to consider but also:

• NSX Edge Routers for external networks
• NSX Edge Routers for vApp networks
• Items stored in catalogs

That's if you're only using vCD as a way to offer a virtual datacenter. Don't get me started on DRaaS or other fancy services you can deliver through vCD.

To complicate this further depending on the featureset you might even have a whole other VCPP bundle to take into account. As paluszekd​'s blogpost explains this is measured dynamically for licensing purposes in the vCloud Usage Meter. Although I might simply restrict users to use only features that are tied to a single bundle at first.

I still need to review if vRealize Business for Cloud (as referenced by the vCAT) might be a suitable solution. But I thought I'd ask for advice in the communities first.

How do you guys take care of metering for chargeback purposes?

Thanks in advance for your reactions!

Rudolf

[SebastianGrugel]

Hello Rudolf.

If I'm good understood your question we are in similar situations.

For billing purposes, we are using OnApp software but we will develop for this some external software in the near future

Currently, we installed a Cassandra database to collect metrics related to VMs.

But we are waiting at vCD 9.5. I heard there will be some module for metrics and billings.. Unfortunately i don't know details yet...

Sebastian

[paluszekd · Accepted solution]

Hi Rudolf,

Thanks for the post. Chargeback for vROps will be natively integrated inside of vCD in the next release of vROps 7.0 (I cannot state the GA date, but this was discussed at VMworld).

Here are some screenshots of what we discussed at VMworld. I do not have any hands-on experience, but I'm hoping to spend some time with it soon to understand the capabilities of it.

Cheers,

-Daniel

[SebastianGrugel]

paluszekd

If this prelection was recorded ? do you have maybe number or name ? thanks

[paluszekd]

Sebastian,

I don't believe Anand and Dan went through these new features specifically in their session, but they do talk about the current state of vROps integration for vCD in this session -

VMworld On-Demand Video Library

[rkleijwegt]

Wow guys!

I'm amazed at how fast I got a reaction to my post. :smileyshocked:

I wouldn't have figured there were too many people active on the communities with cloud provider type of knowledge. Keep it up!

First I will definitely check out the VMworld video on vROps integration for vCD. So thanks for that.

I'm a bit disappointed that vROps apparently is required for chargeback. The company I work for is a service provider that has a strong presence in education where focus on keeping costs down is a key concern. Or else the'll bring their VMs to Azure or some other mega cloud provider. As a result most of our customers make use of the VMware VCloud SP Advanced Bundle. This bundle has the best feature vs. costs balance. However it's missing vROps. To be honest I don't see chargeback manager or vRealize Business in the latest VCPP usage guide.

So as a follow-up question I'd love to hear what options are available from VMware if using vROPs integration for vCD is out of the question. Should I turn to a third party such as OnApp like SebastianGrugel does or even create my own solution?

Again, thanks for your reactions.

Rudolf

Ps. paluszekd will you by any chance be attending VMworld Europe? I'd love to have a chat if possible.

[paluszekd]

Hi Rudolf,

I suggest speaking to your local VMware Cloud Provider team. Our goal is to include the vROps Chargeback into the 7 point bundle (this will be called the core flex bundle) - so there will not be any additional charge for Chargeback capabilities.

Yes, I will be at VMworld Europe, rkleijwegt

I look forward to meeting you!

-Daniel

[rkleijwegt]

For the people that are also interested, skip to 16:50 for the good stuff.

[rkleijwegt]

I'll definitely want to test the vROps Chargeback integration in vCD when it becomes available. If there is a beta program available anytime soon, I'd love to participate.

What I'm looking for in particular is an ability to get detailed metrics of all resources consumed within a vCD. Such as VMs (vCPU, memory, diskspace), Edges and Items stored in a catalog. The goal is not so much as to have a complete solution that can actually generate bills. But a single place that can produce the metrics so we can take those and store them in our own time series database such as InfluxDB.

This way we can take the metrics and create our own pricing policies and generate charges.

Is there any chance this is what's possible with the vROps Chargeback integration in vCD?

[paluszekd]

Understand - I suggest reaching out to your local field team or aggregator to strike up this conversation. As for the metrics requested, I do not know that just yet. I will investigate when time permits. Thanks!

[rkleijwegt]

Absolutely. I'll go ahead and reach out to our local VMware representatives.

Thanks a lot for your help Daniel!

[LooseMoose]

This has always been a problem...we've been down many roads (looked at OnApp, tried AirSembly) and generally wasted a lot of time. We currently have a developer looking at writing an app to pull the allocation data out via the API and apply calculations into our billing system.

Previously vRops has been far too expensive for us (as a smaller provider). I'll be watching this with interest.