vRealize® Operations Tenant App 2.6 is Generally Available and delivers new updates for metering VMware Cloud Director AvailabilityTM replications.

In this post we will review:

• The data flow for VMware Cloud Director Availability metric series collection
• Installation of the vRealize Operations Management Packs for VMware Cloud Director and Cloud Director Availability and configuration of the adapters for data collection
• The key properties gathered by the Management Pack
• New features for Providers who use VMware Cloud Director Availability:
  • New options in the Pricing Policies
  • New sections in the Bills

Data flow for VMware Cloud Director Availability Metric Series Collection

Figure 1 – Data Flow for VMware Cloud Director Availability Metric Series

vRealize Operations Manager collects various metrics from other products by using Management Packs that access the APIs of these products. 

When we talk about VMware Cloud Director Availability data samples, there are two involved Management Packs: 

• MP for VMware Cloud Director Availability that gathers VM/vApp replication information 
• MP for VMware Cloud Director that collects information such as Organizations, OrgVDCs, Storage Policies, VMs, vApps, etc.

When vRealize Operations Manager collects the data, it becomes available for vRealize Operations Tenant App to generate bills.

Installation and Adapter Setup

The setup process for both Management Packs includes a few simple steps.

It is highly recommended to start with the vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Cloud Director as it will bring some of the key elements required and provide your tenants access to some out of the box dashboards in Tenant App.

To start the installation, first, you have to download the vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Cloud Director from here and follow the setup process described in the vRealize Operations Management Pack for vCloud Director Guide.

Once it is successfully installed, you can download the vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Cloud Director Availability from here.

You can find the necessary steps for installing it and configuring the adapter instance in the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cloud Director Availability Install and Use Guide.

Key Properties and Metrics

Even though the Management Packs collect multiple properties and metrics, the most important one used for the replications bill generation is:

• Status|SLA Profile – the name of the SLA profile (property)

Figure 2- Properties collected by the vRealize Operations Management Pack for VMware Cloud Director Availability

You can find the full list of properties and metrics in the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cloud Director Availability Install and Use Guide.

What is new for Providers who use VMware Cloud Director Availability?

Pricing Policies

As an extension to the existing Pricing policies, with vRealize Operations Tenant 2.6, there is a new option to add an additional charge based on the assigned SLA profile. 

The SLA profiles can be assigned to each Organization and provide predefined controls for target RPO, retention policy for the point-in-time instances, compression, quiescing, and more. You can learn more about the SLA profiles from this video.

While creating a new Pricing policy, now you have a new step of the wizard called Cloud Director Availability. This is where you can specify the different rates for each of the SLA profiles used.

Figure 3 – vRealize Operations Tenant App Pricing Policy Wizard

You can add as many SLA profiles as you have, specify the Charge Period and the Base rate for each one of them.

Note: You can assign only one Pricing Policy per Organization, but use the same policy for multiple Organizations.

Bills

The end goal of creating Pricing Policies is to generate a Bill for each Organization. In the Bill itself, along with the well-recognized elements from the previous versions of the vRealize Operations Tenant App, now you can also see the Replication Policy section where the additional charges are listed for each of the SLA profiles in use for the specified period.  

Figure 4 – vRealize Operations Tenant App Example Bill

No matter the method you generate the Bill – through the UI or API, there is no difference in the results, and you can always collect these extra charges.

You can find more information about vRealize Operations Tenant App 2.6 in this whitepaper