Will outage of CB,VC, or ESX managment affect billing for that period?

[admin]

Hello,

Another question is if an outage of CB,VC or ESX management will affect billing.

Lets say CB is down for several hours.

VC might be down.

ESX might loose management while VMs are still running.

thanks.

[deepak_ashwath · Accepted solution]

Hi,

When you add a vCenter to the CB, there will be a Data Collector pointing to the DB of the vCenter.

In CB, Settings there is a JOB - Stats Synchronization, this job comes when you add Enable Stats replication while adding vCenter, this job runs every 30 mins by default. It is a Data Collector job which pulls out information from the vCenter DB every 30 mins, the VM, ESX utilization, consumption.

vCenter outage or ESX outage from vCenter - then I do feel that no information is written to the vCenter DB, hence the CB also loses information and the billing can get affected and there can be loss in money.

Again there will be loss only if you are going for "ACTUAL CONSUMPTION of CPU/Mem or disk etc"

If the costing model is "Fixed" or "Allocation Based" then based on the date the costing is measured and not a problem in this case.

If the CB goes down then there is nothing to be bothered, bec the Stats job can run again to collect back the info from vCenter DB.

Deepak

[HemanthPannem]

Hi

Thanks Deepak for the reply. I would like to add some more information to Deepak’s reply.

Deepak is right about VC and ESX management outage. In short, if VC does not collect the data for a period (for whatever may be the reason), that will affect the billing.

In case of CB outage, there are two cases. This is with respect vCenter Server data collector.

1. Data collector outage

Data collector pulls information about inventory, configuration, stats, storage. If the data collector is down, fetching of all this information would be affected.

For example, during the data collector’s downtime, if a VM is added and deleted, that is not handled by Data collector once it comes back up. The stats and storage information is also affected for these VMs.

Suppose there are no inventory changes during the data collector’s downtime. In this case, if the configuration of VM is changed (i.e. memory changed to 2GB to 4 GB and back to 3 GB), the history of the changes are lost. When the data collector comes back, it will only record a change for 2GB to 3GB. The same is applicable for storage changes.

The stats will not be affected as data collector syncs stats where its left off (unless the vCenter server purge stats script is kicked off during this downtime).

Suppose there are no inventory changes and configuration changes during the data collector’s downtime. In this case, everything should be fine unless the vCenter server purge stats script is kicked off during this downtime

2. CB server outage

If the corresponding data collector is running properly and up all the time, CB server outage does not matter.

Regards,

Hemanth