vRA 8.1 Pricing Card Calculation

[V00Z11]

I’m currently evaluating the new pricing card functionality in vRA 8.1 in our test environment. Our production environment is still on vRA 7.6 and the price calculation is done with vRB. Since vRB is not supported any more with 8.x, we need a new way to do our billing for which we are using the showback and daily reports of vRB.

The integration of vRA 8.1 with vROps 8.1 is working from both sides. The pricing cards are showing the currency configured in vROps and I can see the prices on the deployments. The metering metrics in vROps are visible too and the calculation looks quite right.

What I’m currently missing is the grade of detail which the vRB showback and daily reports are offering. For example:

• Daily uptime in minutes and monthly uptime in hours (VM powered on/off calculation)
• Visibility of configuration changes (added/reduced CPU, RAM, storage)
• Additional charges breakdown (Guest OS, tag based calucation)
• Calculation for deleted machines (e.g. VMs deleted in the middle of the month still needs to be charged)

Is there anything available in vRA or vROPs to get this grade of detail for the calculation? Currently it seems like a black box which is only coming up with values for each day summed up for cpu, memory, storage, additional charges (combined) and total price.

[MichaFit]

Hi ​,

I saw your post regarding vRA 8.1 pricing. Do you implement vRA 8 now in production?​

We are deploying vRA 8.2 as multi-tenancy at the moment and are facing the issue that we cannot display pricing information for the tenant org. vROps 8.2 is connected to the provider org with a service user that hast full access also to the tenant org. Nevertheless it only displays the provider org information. Maybe you have an idea on how we could solve this issue?

Thanks a lot!

[V00Z11]

Hi,

we are not running vRA 8.x in production yet since we are still missing the grade of pricing details which vRB currently offers with vRA 7.x. In particular we need to break down the additional costs for each price (e.g. OS, backup,...). Currently it is summed to one price for all additional cost. We were told by the vROPs pricing guys that this is something they are working on. We hope that this functioniality might ship with the next vRealize release cycle next year.

From what you have wrote I think you maybe ran into a known issue. See the releases notes of vRA 8.2

vRealize Automation 8.2 Release Notes

There is says:

Cost\Price functionality does not work with shared infrastructure multi-tenancy

The pricing functionality might report inaccurate results when configured to a multi-tenant deployment where tenants can share infrastructure resources. This is because pricing does not recognize multi-tenancy.The price is calculated only for the org for which vROPs is added and deployments are created.

Best regards

[Rfichev]

Hi,

It now seems that vROPS provide the possibility to charge deleted deployments as well. When you create your view, in section 2. Presentation there is tick-box called "Include Deleted Objects".