We are pleased to announce a minor update to vCloud Usage Meter 3.6.1 with UM 3.6.1 Hot Patch 2. If Usage Meter is currently not experiencing issues mentioned below, updating to this patch is not necessary.
Hot Patch 2 resolves issues that occur when generating reports in large setups and resolves issues in vCenter collections and metering vSAN and NSX. Hot Patch 2 can be applied in-place to existing 3.6.1 Usage Meter appliances and includes HP1 fixes. Information on HP1 can be found here.
vCloud Usage Meter Performance
In earlier releases of 3.6.x some performance issues were identified in larger deployment that would cause Usage Meter to fail usage collection or report generation. Typically, these were seen in the following situations:
- When generating usage reports
- When generating virtual machine history reports
- VC collection with large number of licenses
The errors can manifest themselves in several different ways. When generating usage reports, you may see high memory and/or CPU usage or errors such as out of memory errors, database shutting down, or emails showing the appliance has restarted. In the case of NSX collections, this error manifests itself with erroneous information in the UI or a timeout error in the logs. Although these errors are typically seen in larger scale environments, the root cause of these issues not directly related to infrastructure scale (i.e. vCenter count, VM count, etc.), but instead the number of events being generated – or churn in the metered infrastructure. In environments where there is a lot of churn such as starting and stopping machines, machine migrations, or adding and removing machines, enough events can be generated that can affect the size and performance of the database.
Solution
Usage Meter 3.6.1 Hot Patch 2 resolves these issues through optimizations which increase the number of events that can be processed and improves overall performance. Report generation time is now reduced and for large environments where reports previously failed to generate some reports may take up to twenty minutes.
You may review the release notes for more details and download UM HP2 here. Provide your feedback on this patch release either on the UM communities page or in the comments section below.
